A team of researchers from Samoa, New Zealand, and the U.S. has found that the leaves of Samoan tree matalafi are as good at relieving inflammation as ibuprofen, reports Medical Xpress. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes how they first studied the plant leaves and then tested them with mammalian immune cells. For hundreds of years, natives of Samoa have been using the leaves of the matalafi tree to...
New Cornell University research shows how to make offshore wind farms more efficient in the face of impending rapid expansion – crucial information as the U.S. Department of the Interior affirmed White House plans to lease federal waters for several giant arrays of wind turbines along the East Coast. "Massive upscaling of wind turbine deployments offshore is critical to achieving global and national goals to decarbonize the electricity supply," said Sara Pryor, professor of...
A team of researchers has developed a model that shows that a hypothetical device that uses solar power to pull water from the air could potentially serve a billion people across the world, reports Tech Xplore. In a paper published in the journal Nature, a group of researchers from X–Alphabet's "moonshot factory," Google and the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, Division of Data, Analytics, Planning and Monitoring, UNICEF, describes the factors that went into their...
Medicines come from chemical reactions, and better chemical reactions lead to better medicines. Yet, the most popular reaction used in drug discovery, called the amide coupling, makes an inherently unstable amide bond. Because the body excels at metabolizing medication, one of the most important and difficult goals of drug research is to invent metabolically stable molecules, so we can take one pill a day instead of every 15 minutes. Researchers at the University of...
Researchers in the U.S. and Japan have demonstrated the first experimental cross-sectional medical image that doesn't require tomography, a mathematical process used to reconstruct images in CT and PET scans. The work, published in Nature Photonics, could lead to cheaper, easier, and more accurate medical imaging. The advance was made possible by development of ultrafast photon detectors, said the paper's senior author Simon Cherry, professor of biomedical engineering and radiology at the University of...
A novel approach to treating type 2 diabetes is being developed at the American Technion Society. The disease, caused by insulin resistance and reduction of cells' ability to absorb sugar, is characterized by increased blood sugar levels. Its long-term complications include heart disease, strokes, damage to the retina that can result in blindness, kidney failure, and poor blood flow in the limbs that may lead to amputations. It is currently treated by a combination...
A new study led by researchers at UCLA Health has found that women over the age of 50 who had breastfed their babies performed better on cognitive tests compared to women who had never breastfed. The findings, published in Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, suggest that breastfeeding may have a positive impact on postmenopausal women's cognitive performance and could have long-term benefits for the mother's brain. The researchers analysed data collected from women participating...
A new study has brought us closer to understanding some of the brain's evolution, Phys.org reports. It shows that human brains decreased in size approximately 3,000 years ago. In studying ants as models to illustrate why brains may increase or decrease in size, researchers hypothesize that brain shrinkage parallels the expansion of collective intelligence in human societies. "A surprising fact about humans today is that our brains are smaller compared to the brains of...
Netflix subscriptions picked up in the third quarter of 2021 as non-English language shows continued to be the streaming platform's best performers, the BBC reports. The U.S. firm added 4.4 million users in the three months to Sept. 30, more than double the previous quarter. Korean TV series Squid Game was its biggest hit, watched by 142 million households in its first four weeks. It comes as some Netflix staff prepared to walk out on Wednesday amid a...
(University of Michigan) – Even as the opioid epidemic dominated national attention over the past decade, the rate of overdose deaths among military veterans involving cocaine, methamphetamine, and other stimulants tripled, a new study suggests. More than half of the 3,631 veterans who died from overdoses involving these drugs between 2012 and 2018 had other substances in their systems, the study finds. In this group, most of those other substances were opioids, including synthetic...
