“For more than 30 years, we have collaborated with our Model System colleagues...,” said Trevor Dyson-Hudson, MD, director of the Center for Spinal Cord injury Research at Kessler Foundation and co-director of the NNJSCIS. “This most recent grant enables us to continue to contribute to the important work of the SCI Model Systems." Steven Kirshblum, MD, is co-director of the NNJSCIS, director of Spinal Cord Injury Services at Kessler Institute, and chief medical officer for Kessler Institute and Kessler Foundation: "We will compare the successes of a person-centered early intervention called vocational resource facilitation with that of conventional vocational rehabilitation, looking at individuals’ return to competitive employment following inpatient rehabilitation at Kessler Institute.”

A pharmaceutical product called TT-10, which spurs proliferation of heart muscle cells, was thought to offer promise to treat heart attacks. In a mouse heart-attack model several years ago, intraperitoneal injection of TT-10 at first promoted proliferation of heart muscle cells and showed declines in the size of the dead area of heart muscle. However, these early improvements were followed by worsened cardiac function at later time points. Now researchers show that a different delivery method, nanoparticle-mediated, slow-release of TT-10, enhances the potency and durability of TT-10 treatment for repair of heart muscle in the mouse heart-attack model.

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.

Interleukin-12 – a messenger molecule of immune cells – was long considered to trigger the development of psoriasis. Now, researchers at the University of Zurich have shown that interleukin-12 does not actually cause the skin disease but protects against it. This also explains why common psoriasis drugs that block the messenger show insufficient treatment efficacy.

In 2015 a small team of Virginia Cooperative Extension agents, farmers, and representatives from state and federal conservation agencies from Northern Piedmont and Northern Shenandoah Valley created the Graze 300 VA Initiative “to enable Virginia farmers to achieve 300 days of livestock grazing per year by facilitating better pasture management and environmental stewardship.” Since then, Graze 300 VA has grown to 30 Extension agents and specialists working together with farmers across Virginia.

The American Physical Society awards the Rahman Prize to Argonne senior scientist Giulia Galli.