Around a quarter of acute stroke patients experience swallowing disorders, medically known as dysphagia. The conditions include difficulty in moving food or liquid into the esophagus, which often leads to choking and other serious complications. In severe cases, food particles entering the trachea can result in pneumonia or even suffocation. While the physical dangers of dysphagia are well-known, its psychological impact on stroke survivors is increasingly recognized as an equally pressing concern. The Psychological Impact of Dysphagia Recent studies reveal…
Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector in the world. In order to meet the growing demand, solutions are needed outside of coastal waters, which are heavily polluted by shipping, tourism and the expansion of coastal structures. The international joint project “Ngā Punga o te Moana – Anchoring Our Open Ocean Future”, in which TU Braunschweig is involved, addresses precisely this issue. It aims to shift aquaculture from congested coastal regions to open, exposed ocean areas. Experts from the fields…
Researchers from Bonn show which procedure reduces the amount of anesthetic discarded: Propofol is used in the operating room to induce anesthesia. To maintain anesthesia, a continuous infusion of the agent via a separate syringe pump is the standard procedure for total intravenous anesthesia. However, this is not entirely sustainable: propofol produces about 45 percent of the drug waste in the operating room, and a quarter of the agent remains unused. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the…
Can exoskeletons make strenuous activities easier and allow people to do hard work for longer and in a healthier way? A study by TU Graz says yes, but not always. Hard physical work is not healthy for anyone in the long term. Sooner or later, many people suffer from back, joint or muscular complaints. Exoskeletons are a technology that promises support for this type of work and therefore less physical strain. In the ExoFitStyria project, the Institute of Innovation and…
Study establishes link for the first time. The innovative strength of a society depends on the level of academic freedom. An international team involving the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now proven this relationship for the first time. The researchers analyzed patent applications and patent citations in a sample from around 160 countries over the 1900–2015 period in relation to indicators used in the Academic Freedom Index. In view of the global decline in academic freedom over the past…
Whether or not a person becomes seriously ill with COVID-19 depends, among other things, on genetic factors. With this in mind, researchers from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn, in cooperation with other research teams from Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy, investigated a particularly large group of affected individuals. They confirmed the central and already known role of the TLR7 gene in severe courses of the disease in men, but were also able to find…
The study, published today in Journal of Fluid Mechanics, reveals for the first time how noise is generated and propagated from these engines, technically known as boundary layer ingesting (BLI) ducted fans. BLI ducted fans are similar to the large engines found in modern airplanes but are partially embedded into the plane’s main body instead of under the wings. As they ingest air from both the front and from the surface of the airframe, they don’t have to work as…
The evolution of TB, the earliest confirmed presence of the causative agents in human remains. Recent research suggests that the emergence of tuberculosis infection in human populations dates back tens of thousands of years earlier than previously known cases in the Middle East. In collaboration with an international research team, Hungarian researchers have edited and published a special issue of the journal Tuberculosis. In July 2022, the Department of Anthropology of the University of Szeged organised a conference on the…
A team from the Vehicle Safety Institute at TU Graz has used Human Body Models to investigate accidents involving electric scooters and identified the most important factors for preventing serious injuries. The use of e-scooters has increased significantly in recent years, but so has the number of accidents involving this relatively new form of transport. At the same time, knowledge about injury mechanisms in this area was still very limited. In the project SURF, funded by Zukunftsfonds Steiermark, the Vehicle…
Leipzig scientists publish largest meta-analysis on language processing to date. A new study has provided the first clear picture of where language processes are located in the brain. The findings may be useful in clinical trials involving language recovery after brain injury. Dr Sabrina Turker, Dr Philipp Kuhnke and Professor Gesa Hartwigsen from the Wilhelm Wundt Institute of Psychology at Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences conducted the meta-analysis in collaboration with researchers…
A study of nearly 500,000 people has shown that smoking shortens the end fragments of chromosomes in the white blood cells of our immune systems. The length of these end fragments, called telomeres, is an indicator of how quickly we age and our cells’ ability to repair and regenerate. In her presentation to the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Milan, Italy [1], Dr Siyu Dai, who is an assistant professor in the School of Clinical Medicine, Hangzhou Normal University,…
On-chip laser diodes based on quantum well (QW) and quantum dot (QD) semiconductor materials have become the primary candidates for several applications due to their excellent characteristics, including high power efficiency, high-temperature operation, and small form-factors. Although QWs have been extensively used in commercial products, QDs have emerged as an attractive alternative due to their unique zero-dimensional density of states and atom-like degeneracy. Heterogeneous integration of III-V lasers with SiN microresonators, aided by self-injection locking, not only provides intrinsic advantages…
Better living through machine learning. A groundbreaking machine-learning study has unmasked the best drug combinations to prevent COVID-19 from coming back after an initial infection. It turns out these combos are not the same for every patient. Using real-world data from a hospital in China, the UC Riverside-led study found that individual characteristics, including age, weight, and additional illness determine which drug combinations most effectively reduce recurrence rates. This finding has been published in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. …
A simple sponge has improved how robots grasp, scientists from the University of Bristol have found. This easy-to-make sponge-jamming device can help stiff robots handle delicate items carefully by mimicking the nuanced touch, or variable stiffness, of a human. Robots can skip, jump and do somersaults, but they’re too rigid to hold an egg easily. Variable-stiffness devices are potential solutions for contact compliance on hard robots to reduce damage, or for improving the load capacity of soft robots. This…
People with autism spectrum disorder can be classified into four distinct subtypes based on their brain activity and behavior, according to a study from Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. The study, published March 9 in Nature Neuroscience, leveraged machine learning to analyze newly available neuroimaging data from 299 people with autism and 907 neurotypical people. They found patterns of brain connections linked with behavioral traits in people with autism, such as verbal ability, social affect, and repetitive or stereotypic behaviors. They confirmed…
A leaking mitral valve can be repaired surgically or with catheter-based techniques. A so-called mitral valve prolapse is particularly common, in which part of the valve protrudes (prolapses) into the left atrium. The American PRIMARY study investigates which method is most suitable for repairing mitral valves in patients with degenerative mitral valve insufficiency who are at low surgical risk. The German arm of the study, with 113 patients, is led by Prof. Volkmar Falk of the German Heart Institute at…
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