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The presence of peers is a key prompt for alcohol cravings among young people, according to a new study in Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research. When certain settings, people, or items—a bar, a friend, a glass—are paired with alcohol, they can become conditioned cues, eliciting drinking cravings. These learned reactions are associated with alcohol use disorder (AUD), treatment outcomes, and relapse. Adolescents and emerging adults are particularly susceptible to peer influence. In real-world settings, studies have found that the presence of peers predicts young people’s intensifying drinking cravings at the moment. In laboratory studies, however, peer influence is largely absent, potentially limiting the usefulness of their findings. Better understanding peers as alcohol cues could inform more effective AUD prevention and treatment programs. For the current study, researchers from Brown University, RI, evaluated alcohol cravings among youth in the human laboratory, using drinking-

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Survival rate beyond 10 years in children with drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) was highest after cranial epilepsy surgery and lowest when treated only with antiseizure medications, according to a study published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health. This large, retrospective study was the first to compare long-term survival in children with DRE among cohorts treated with medications only, vagus nerve stimulation plus medications, and cranial epilepsy surgery plus medications. Results show that risk of early death was reduced by over 80 percent after surgery and by 40 percent after vagus nerve stimulation, compared to medication-only treatment.

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An MD Anderson-led Phase II trial showed the HER2-targeted therapy zanidatamab demonstrated durable responses in patients with advanced HER2-positive biliary tract cancer. The data were presented at the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting.

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The world should be prepared to respond to a disease outbreak of “even deadlier potential” than COVID-19, the head of the WHO said after the UN agency launched a global network to monitor disease threats.

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An international team of marine biologists has discovered the remnants of ancient RNA viruses embedded in the DNA of symbiotic organisms living inside reef-building corals.

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According to the federal government’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, nearly 3 million people worldwide — with almost a third in the United States — are living with multiple sclerosis (MS), a disabling neurological disease in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks nerves feeding information to the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord). Although rarely fatal, MS can lead to long-term disabilities, and impair movement, muscle control, vision and cognition.

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Revelation of a sharp decline in the valuation of Twitter “illustrates not just the consequences of [Elon] Musk’s stewardship, but the myriad challenges that exist for anyone managing a social media platform,” explains Virginia Tech media expert Megan Duncan. “Buying a social media platform might be easy, but governing it is hard.”

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Multiple sclerosis has traditionally been considered a condition that predominantly affects white people of European ancestry. However, a new analysis conducted by a North American team led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers suggests that the debilitating neurological condition is more prevalent in Black Americans than once thought. It is also far more prevalent in Northern regions of the country including New England, the Dakotas, and the Pacific Northwest.

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Theoretical calculations involving the strong force are complex in part because of the large number of ways these calculations can be performed. These options include “gauge choices.” All gauge choices should produce the same result for the calculation of any quantity that can be measured in an experiment. However, it is difficult to obtain consistent results when using one particular choice, “axial gauge.” New research resolves this puzzle.

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Outside atomic nuclei, neutrons are unstable, disintegrating in about fifteen minutes due to the weak nuclear force to leave behind a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. New research identified a shift in the strength with which a spinning neutron experiences the weak nuclear force, due to emission and absorption of photons and pions. The finding impacts high precision searches of new, beyond the Standard Model interactions in beta decay.

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A tiny population of T-cells could serve as a much-needed biomarker—and a potential therapeutic target—for pediatric acute liver failure, according to new research from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

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The American Tinnitus Association (ATA) has elected Jinsheng Zhang, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in Wayne State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as the new chair of its board of directors.

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Rigoberto Advincula, a renowned scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Tennessee, has won the Netzsch North American Thermal Analysis Society (NATAS) Fellows Award for 2023.

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AAI has been recognized with a 2023 ASAE Gold Circle Award

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An international team of astrophysicists has discovered something wholly new, hidden in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

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New research suggests that the immune system’s ability to respond to spinal cord injuries diminishes with age – and identifies potential avenues to improve that response and help patients heal.

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Global celebration of 11 years of discovery and lifesaving innovation in immuno-oncology

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Research to improve the detection of Salmonella and to speed up the development of new medicines received funding from a Florida State University program that supports faculty moving their work from the lab to the marketplace.

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After pioneering a system to improve swine health by collecting and publicizing pathogen testing results from large public veterinary laboratories across the Midwest, a team led by faculty from Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine is planning to bore even deeper to glean more insight from the vast data set.

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandated folic acid fortification of all enriched cereal grains in 1996, and this regulation resulted in a reduction of neural tube defect (NTD)–affected pregnancies for the population in the United States.

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ASBMB travel awards support biomedical research projects and career development for trainees from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain to work in labs in North America

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Many types of preventive care have been available for years with no cost to the patient. But that provision now hangs in the balance, because of a court case. Two professors explain what's at stake and why.

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Physicists analyzing data from gold ion smashups at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, are searching for evidence that nails down a so-called critical point in the way nuclear matter changes from one phase to another.

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The American College of Sports Medicine® (ACSM) recognized several distinguished award recipients at its annual meeting and world congresses held May 30 – June 2 in Denver, Co.

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A study involving UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers found when ribociclib, a targeted therapy drug, is added to hormone therapy there are significant survival benefits for patients with early hormone-receptor (HR) positive/HER2 negative breast cancer.