Connecting Research and Experts with Journalists

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New AI model identifies possible therapies from existing medicines for thousands of diseases, including rare ones with no current treatments. The AI tool generates new insights on its own, applies them to conditions it was not trained for, and offers explanations for its predictions.

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A new paper in Nature Machine Intelligence notes that journal articles reporting how well machine learning models solve certain kinds of equations are often overly optimistic. The researchers suggest two rules for reporting results and systemic changes to encourage clarity and accuracy in reporting.

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Giving women at risk of premature birth a simple magnesium sulphate infusion (or ‘drip’) can prevent their babies from developing cerebral palsy, a recent Cochrane review has confirmed. The drug itself costs approximately £5 (~$6.50) per dose in England, and requires hospital admission with experienced staff to administer the drug safely to the mother. A new editorial calls for this intervention to be implemented more widely and equitably, as it is still not consistently available worldwide.

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Predatory snails drill holes in the shells of their prey. Using these boreholes, a research team led by palaeontologist Martin Zuschin from the University of Vienna was able to create a time series of predator-prey relationships in the northern Adriatic over the past millennia. This showed that human influences led to a collapse in predator-prey relationships from the 1950s onwards. The study was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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This study presents a highly efficient thermal simulation method using a non-gray phonon Boltzmann transport equation. By integrating first-principles phonon properties and advanced computational techniques, the method avoids empirical parameters and achieves remarkable efficiency, solving large-scale 3D problems in under two hours on a personal computer. It enables predictive design of nanostructures with specific thermal conductivity and accurately resolves temperature profiles at the transistor level, aiding in understanding self-heating effects in electronics.

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Independent of the temperature and humidity carried by the airflow, portable respiratory sensors are capable of continuously detecting respiratory intensity and frequency. Respiratory monitoring assesses physiological status and potential disease, preventing the escalation of adverse health conditions through early detection of recurrent wheezing, sleep apnoea and diabetes-induced kussmaul breathing.

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A research team at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory created a novel advanced microscopy tool to “write” with atoms, placing those atoms exactly where they are needed to give a material new properties.

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Children born to mothers with obesity both before and during pregnancy have an increased risk of neuropsychiatric and behavioural conditions, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to new research from the University of South Australia.

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Using genomics and early treatment response to guide risk-stratification and low-intensity therapy use for ETV6::RUNX1 and high-hyperdiploid B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia benefits patients.