The scientists published their findings in two papers in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia. In the past two years, there have been a number of clinical trials producing disappointing results for high-profile drugs, making some pharmaceutical companies abandon Alzheimer’s altogether. The flaws in the ADAS-Cog test could be partly responsible. The ADAS-Cog test has been used as a key indicator on whether a drug is working. The test scores patients on 11 components using a variety of tasks associated with memory, language and praxis....

The decision means that only patients who have enrolled in clinical trials will be eligible for Medicare coverage for Aduhelm, which goes by the generic drug name of Aducanumab. Many Alzheimer’s patients may be unable to utilize the medicine due to the restrictions. Aduhelm’s annual cost without Medicare is US$28,200, or $2,350 per month, which is prohibitively expensive for most Americans. What’s more, not everyone with mild Alzheimer’s will be able to enroll in a clinical trial due to location or other logistical issues....

Gym-goers may get frustrated when they don’t see results from weightlifting right away, but their efforts are not in vain: the first few weeks of training strengthen the nervous system, not muscles. New research published in JNeurosci reveals how. The brain orchestrates movement via two major neural highways descending to the spinal cord: the corticospinal tract (CST) and reticulospinal tract (RST). The CST is thought to be the dominant pathway, with the RST controlling posture....

Support for populist parties and politicians, and agreement with populist sentiment, has diminished during the pandemic, according to a “mega-dataset” taking in attitudes of over half a million people across 109 countries since 2020. A University of Cambridge team say there are clear signs of a turning tide for the “populist wave,” as the mishandling of coronavirus by populist leaders – along with a desire for stability and a decline in “polarizing” attitudes resulting from the pandemic – starts to move public opinion....

“The need for hardware-based security features reflects the globalized nature of modern electronics manufacture,” explains Yehia Massoud from KAUST. Electronics companies usually employ large specialized, external foundries to produce their chips, which minimizes costs but introduces potential vulnerabilities to the supply chain. The circuit design could simply be illegally copied by an untrusted foundry for counterfeit chip production or could be maliciously modified by the incorporation of “hardware Trojans” into the circuitry that detrimentally affects its behavior in some way....

Study finds people with diabetes who eat less processed food at night may live longer and eating carbs earlier in the day is linked to better heart health. The time of day that people with diabetes eat certain foods may be just as important to their well-being as portion size and calories, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Mealtimes should be in line with the biological clock—a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep–wake cycle and repeats every 24 hours....

The bright pink cloud and the young stars surrounding it in this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have the uninspiring name LHA 120-N 150. This region of space is located on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula, which is the largest known stellar nursery in the local Universe. The nebula is situated over 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring irregular dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way....

There has been a lot of buzz about Tongkat Ali on the internet lately. Over recent months, the compound, derived from the Southeast Asian Eurycoma longifolia plant, has soared in popularity for its supposed health and hormonal benefits. Still, a fair bit of suspicion has also made its way into the conversation. Tongkat Ali skeptics sight several concerns regarding its potential long-term health consequences and a shortage of scientific evidence supporting its safety and efficacy....

Using genetic modification of animals to reduce food costs and improve quality is what researchers are trying to get at. Getting funding for GE animals is problematic. 0.1% of research grants from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have gone to GE food animals since 1999. There have been plenty of projects that have been shelved due to a lack of funding. Instead of using genetic engineering, researchers have had to focus on conventional breeding techniques to create specific traits, which is inefficient....

Ultra-processed foods are low in protein and fiber and heavy in added sugar, fat, and salt. Soft drinks, salty and sweet snacks, ice cream, sausage, deep-fried chicken, yogurt, canned tomatoes and baked beans, ketchup, mayonnaise, packaged guacamole and hummus, packaged bread, and flavored cereals are some examples of ultra-processed foods. “Ultra-processed foods are meant to be convenient and tasty, but they diminish the quality of a person’s diet,” said study author Huiping Li, Ph....

In a famous parable, three blind men encounter an elephant for the first time. Each touches a part—the trunk, ear, or side—and concludes the creature is a thick snake, fan, or wall. This elephant, said Kang-Kuen Ni, is like the quantum world. Scientists can only explore a cell of this vast, unknown creature at a time. Now, Ni has revealed a few more to explore. It all started last December, when she and her team completed a new apparatus that could achieve the lowest temperature chemical reactions of any currently available technology and then broke and formed the coldest bonds in the history of molecular coupling....

A temperature not seen since the first microsecond of the birth of the universe has been recreated by scientists, and they discovered that the event did not unfold quite the way they expected. The interaction of energy, matter, and the strong nuclear force in the ultra-hot experiments conducted at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was thought to be well understood. However, a detailed investigation has revealed that physicists are missing something in their model of how the universe works....

Scientists are still investigating to figure it out, and they’re now one step closer, due to an international collaboration identifying compensation errors in widely used climate model protocols known as CMIP6. They published their findings today (September 20) in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. “Cloud and radiation biases over the Southern Ocean have been a long-lasting problem in the past generations of global climate models,” said corresponding author Yuan Wang....

Scientists have long known that solar-energized particles trapped around the planet are sometimes scattered into Earth’s upper atmosphere where they can contribute to beautiful auroral displays. Yet for decades, no one has known exactly what is responsible for hurling these energetic electrons on their way. Recently, two spacecraft found themselves at just the right places at the right time to witness first hand both the impulsive electron loss and its cause....

As we approach two full years of the COVID-19 pandemic, we now know it spreads primarily through airborne transmission. The virus rides inside tiny microscopic droplets or aerosol ejected from our mouths when we speak, shout, sing, cough, or sneeze. It then floats within the air, where it can be inhaled and transmitted. This inspired researchers in India to explore how we can better understand and engineer airflow to mitigate the transmission of COVID-19....

Among other intriguing findings, the new study led by Stockholm University and deCODE genetics (Reykjavik) offers insight into migration patterns and gene flow during the Viking age (750–1050 CE). It also shows that ancestries that were introduced into the area during the Viking period later declined for reasons that aren’t clear. “Although still evident in modern Scandinavians, levels of non-local ancestry in some regions are lower than those observed in ancient individuals from the Viking to Medieval periods,” said Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela of Stockholm University....

Yes, unfortunately, they are. We’re seeing increases in the intensity and the severity, the overall burned area of wildfires and the duration of fire across the fire season. And while fire is a natural part of ecosystems, what’s really driving this change is we’re seeing a lot of changes in our climate. We’re seeing increases in global temperature as well as more extreme weather events, so longer droughts. And so we have these hot and dry conditions, which makes vegetation, forests and grasses more available to burn because they’re drier....

So, tell us a bit about this galaxy, WLM. What’s interesting about it? WLM is a dwarf galaxy in our galactic neighborhood. It’s fairly close to the Milky Way (only about 3 million light-years from Earth), but it’s also relatively isolated. We think WLM hasn’t interacted with other systems, which makes it really nice for testing our theories of galaxy formation and evolution. Many of the other nearby galaxies are intertwined and entangled with the Milky Way, which makes them harder to study....

Formed as a result of a collision between a large spiral galaxy and another smaller galaxy, the galaxy not only retained a lot of its spiral character, but has also experienced massive changes throughout its structure. Webb’s high-precision instruments resolved individual stars and star-forming regions within the Cartwheel. They also revealed the behavior of the black hole within its galactic center. These new details provide a renewed understanding of a galaxy in the midst of a slow transformation....

Researchers found 21 prospective risk genes using fresh human brain tissue collected by biopsy or autopsy from 150 donors, and they highlighted one, SPI1, as a potential key regulator of microglia and AD risk. “Our study is the largest human fresh-tissue microglia analysis to date of genetic risk factors that might predispose someone to Alzheimer’s disease,” says senior author Panos Roussos, MD, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry, and Genetic and Genomic Sciences, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Director of the Center for Disease Neurogenomics....