Latest News Releases 5 August

Dr. Wylie, director of the Ortenzio Center at Kessler Foundation: “Our neuroimaging data show that the role of middle frontal areas of the brain changes with age. Younger individuals may use these areas to combat fatigue, but this is not the case with older individuals. Moreover, these results suggest that women show greater resilience when faced with a fatiguing task. This study is an important first step toward explaining some of the differences reported in the literature of fatigue, by showing that state and trait measures of fatigue measure different aspects of fatigue, and that age and gender both appear to affect the relationship between state fatigue and brain activation."

MIT researchers have designed a new device, which doesn’t rely on immunosuppressing drugs, may assist efforts to develop an artificial pancreas to treat diabetes.

The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) is launching an ambitious initiative, the Athena collaboration tool, that will help keep NPS and the Department of the Navy in-the-know on operationally-focused research, as well as accelerating solutions to critical problems impacting naval forces today.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published Phenopackets, the first clear computational way to responsibly share individual patient traits, removing a major barrier to research on disease diagnosis, treatment, and mechanism discovery.

During a battle with cancer, T cells can become exhausted and are no longer able to function properly. The early phase of exhaustion can sometimes be reversed with immunotherapy drugs, but once T cells become too exhausted, it had been thought that this state was irreversible. However, new insights from University of Pittsburgh and UPMC researchers suggest that even the most fatigued T cells can be revived.

Vaccine distribution faces big challenges, as the COVID crisis has shown. Now, a multidisciplinary research team has overcome some of the major issues that plague the distribution of biomedical materials. They have developed a hydrogel that encapsulates proteins and allows for a wider margin of temperatures along the cold chain. This discovery could potentially save lives and billions of dollars.

The immune boosting benefits of a tuberculosis vaccine can be seen in infants more than one year after vaccination, according to a new study.

A systematic review of 301 academic articles on “cultural ecosystem services” has enabled researchers to identify how these nonmaterial contributions from nature are linked to and significantly affect human well-being. They identified 227 unique pathways through which human interaction with nature positively or negatively affects well-being. These were then used to isolate 16 distinct underlying mechanisms, or types of connection, through which people experience these effects. This comprehensive review brings together observations from a fragmented field of research, which could be of great use to policymakers looking to benefit society through the careful use and protection of the intangible benefits of nature.

A clinical trial is only as powerful as its participants. For years, researchers have struggled to fill clinical trials and enroll sufficiently diverse groups of patients for results to reflect the broader population, in part because of stringent guidelines on who can participate.