Manuel Salmeron, principal investigator at IBEC, has been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept Grant. These prestigious grants are awarded by the European Research Council to explore the commercial and social potential of research projects carried out at European institutions. Salmeron's project, FACTORINK, focuses on designing functional bioinks with biological activity for printing artificial tissues.

Autistic adults have shared the challenges and misunderstandings they face when communicating with body language, facial expressions and tone of voice, as part of a study led by the University of Portsmouth in England.

In recent years, every new car driver has been getting used to bells and beeps. As automakers try to make cars safer, they’ve introduced increasingly sophisticated driving assistance systems, to warn a driver when they’re drifting out of their lane or someone’s in their blind spot. But do these features actually improve safety? New research from Ashish Agarwal, associate professor of information, risk, and operations management at Texas McCombs, says not always. By considering how human beings react to different kinds of warning signals, he suggests, automakers could better reduce risky driving behaviors.

“When they’re designing these features, they have to be aware that in some cases, they may make behaviors worse,” Agarwal says.

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study, stronger gun laws correlated with decreased overall firearm mortality, with the strongest correlations for decreased suicides. For firearm suicide, this analyses lend support to policies that regulate firearm sales, transfers, and permitting laws. While some gun law categories were correlated with decreased firearm homicide, sociodemographic factors, such as unemployment, poverty, and insurance status, correlated with larger changes, suggesting policies that address root causes of violence through economic mobility and access to robust social, health, and educational services may be associated with a greater reduction in homicides. 

About The Study: In this multiple-events case-control study, long-term obesity was associated with the expression of biochemical aging markers in adults ages 28 to 31, consistent with epigenetic alterations, telomere attrition, chronic inflammation, impaired nutrient sensing, mitochondrial stress, and compromised intercellular communication. In young adults, chronic health issues may emerge from accelerated biological aging associated with long-term obesity.