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New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
This month Sanjay (not his real name) opened his mail to find a document giving him the right to live and work permanently in the United States. Getting a green card marks the highlight of a 16-year immigration odyssey for the Indian-born software engineer, who came to the United States on a college scholarship and later founded an artificial intelligence (AI) company that helps banks protect assets using a patent he invented. According to newly released data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), more foreign-born workers in science, technology, engineering, and math fields are enjoying such hap...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 27, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

This vibrating diet pill may trick the stomach into feeling full
People trying to lose weight embark on grueling diets, undergo procedures to shrink their stomachs, or pony up for expensive new drugs like Ozempic . Now, researchers have revealed a gentler and potentially cheaper option: a vibrating pill that stimulates nerve endings in the stomach to tell the brain it’s time to stop eating. The capsule—reported today in Science Advances — slashes food intake in pigs without causing obvious side effects . Scientists now hope to develop it into an obesity treatment for humans. “It’s a credible and ingenious approach,” says neurobiologi...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 22, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Once reluctant, new NIH chief Monica Bertagnolli has embraced her leading role
When cancer surgeon Monica Bertagnolli learned earlier this year that President Joe Biden wanted her to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the $47.5 billion agency that is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, “I didn’t embrace it,” she says with a laugh. She was just a few months into heading NIH’s largest component, the National Cancer Institute (NCI). “My reaction was: ‘But I’m the NCI director and I have plans.’ We were accomplishing some really great things together. And it was just too soon.” But the idea grew on her. She had gotten to know the chiefs of NIH’s 26 ot...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 22, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Lost history of Antarctica revealed in octopus DNA
Some 100,000 years ago, scientists believe Antarctica’s massive western ice sheet collapsed, temporarily opening waterways between a trio of seas surrounding the continent. New evidence for that scenario comes from a surprising source: octopus DNA. The ice sheet’s collapse allowed long-separated populations of Turquet’s octopus ( Pareledone turqueti ) to interbreed for thousands of years; when the sheet reformed, the animals were isolated once more, a story that has been recorded in the sea creatures’ genes , researchers report today in Science . The work also bolsters concerns t...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 21, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

News at a glance: Climate summit booed, a big dino bite, and a diamond-hard discovery
PALEONTOLOGY Near-perfect pliosaur skull hints at big bite A U.K. team that includes amateur fossil hunters is studying the recently discovered skull of a pliosaur, a large, carnivorous marine reptile that dominated ancient oceans about 150 million years ago, news media reported last week. The specimen was found in 2022 embedded in a cliff along Dorset’s famed Jurassic Coast, where the pioneering 19th century amateur fossil hunter Mary Anning once discovered skeletons of other marine dinosaurs. Scientists are calling the new skull, about 2 meters long, one of the most complete of its kind. After me...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 21, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Astronomers home in on offspring of universe ’s first stars
The universe’s very first stars were giants that burned fast and died young in spectacular explosions. They may never be spotted directly—although NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which by looking far away can see back to the times when they were shining , may get lucky. In the meantime, astronomers may have discovered the next best thing: a descendant, born from the wreckage of a first-generation star, that has been quietly shining near the Milky Way ever since. A closer inspection, and finding more descendants like it, could clue researchers into how big the first stars were and how they affected the un...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 21, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Peru moves to crack down on scientific fraudsters
Lawmakers in Peru are poised to approve legislation that would make it easier to investigate and punish researchers who engage in fraudulent publishing practices, including paying to have their names added to a scientific paper. The move comes as Peru’s national science agency seeks to crack down on authorship buying and other unethical practices. It recently removed two scientists accused of violations from a national registry that is key to receiving government grants, job promotions, and salary bonuses. And officials are investigating many more researchers in the wake of an October media report that identified 1...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 21, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

NRA donations spike in counties that have experienced school shootings
School shootings are tragically familiar in the United States. But a new analysis shows they have a startling consequence. In the very counties where they occur, the National Rifle Association (NRA) sees a surge in donation amounts and in new donors that lasts several years after shootings, according to an analysis of 131 school shootings with at least one fatality between 2000 and 2022. The finding, published today in Science Advances , echoes well-documented surges in gun purchases and donations to NRA, the leading U.S. gun rights lobbyist, after mass shootings. But the hyperlocal effect is new ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 20, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Kids with chattier parents are more talkative, may have bigger vocabulary
Why do some children learn to talk earlier than others? Linguists have pointed to everything from socioeconomic status to gender to the number of languages their parents speak. But a new study finds a simpler explanation. An analysis of nearly 40,000 hours of audio recordings from children around the world suggests kids speak more when the adults around them are more talkative, which may also give them a larger vocabulary early in life . Factors such as social class appear to make no difference, researchers report this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 20, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

A ghostly quasiparticle rooted in a century-old Italian mystery could unlock quantum computing ’s potential
Santa Barbara, California —Reclusive and disaffected, Ettore Majorana liked to work in the shadows. But after his friend Emilio Segrè dragged him into Enrico Fermi’s elite Roman physics club in the late 1920s, Majorana’s stature in atomic physics quickly grew. His mostly unpublished premonitions were eerily prescient: Among others, he famously intuited the existence of the neutron from prior experiments. And in 1937, he conjured up a completely new kind of particle . Physicists had learned that every fundamental particle seems to have an antimatter counterpart, an idea Segrè would later earn a Nobel ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 20, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Why do most dogs have brown eyes?
When a cute pooch stares up at you, all you want to do is bend down and scratch their belly. If you caught a wolf staring your way, you’d probably recoil in fear. Eye color may be at least partially to blame, according to a new study. Most wolves sport piercing yellow peepers, whereas most dogs have brown eyes— a hue humans may have selected for because it looks less threatening . The findings, reported today in Royal Society Open Science , fit with existing research on how people have changed the appearance of dogs over our shared history , says Molly Selba, an anatomist at the Univ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 20, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

This algorithm could predict your health, income, and chance of premature death
If you could flip ahead a few pages in the story of your life, would you take a peek? Artificial intelligence (AI) may now offer a version of this choice, say researchers behind a study out today in Nature Computational Science . By crunching data from millions of people’s lives, the authors note, a fortune-telling algorithm can predict a person’s life outcomes with eerie accuracy, such as their lifetime earnings or their likelihood of facing an early death. The finding adds to a recent trend blending machine learning with the social sciences . If the approach can be shown to work ac...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 18, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Chimps remember the faces of old friends and family for decades
This study, she says, opens “a window into the incredibly rich interior emotional life of chimpanzees.” (Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment)
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 18, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Vocal therapy changes vocal cords of transgender patients without need for surgery
This study shows there is a proven, objective value of voice therapy.” Dionisio says she’d like future studies in this area to focus not only on physiological changes, but also on whether those changes actually aided the patients’ transitions, such as by whether these women were perceived to be of their desired gender by others. Overall, the authors say they hope their work will play a role in helping trans individuals more easily and cheaply access vocal therapy. “Getting voice therapy covered by the insurance companies for transgender individuals is like pulling teeth sometimes,” Dion says. “For a...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 18, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, whose crimes inspired an opera, headed to prison
Paolo Macchiarini, the former stem cell surgeon who was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison by a Swedish court for aggravated assault against patients he treated, is expected to begin his sentence sometime in the coming weeks. But he is likely to serve his sentence in Spain, where he currently lives, not in Sweden. The saga surrounding Macchiarini, who was once considered a pioneer of regenerative medicine for implanting patients with synthetic windpipes seeded with their own stem cells, has been the topic of multiple documentaries and podcasts, and has even inspired an opera . In recent weeks he has gained ne...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 18, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research