Author: healthadmin
This story is written by Grist chicago public mediaa public media company serving the Chicago metropolitan area. Serap Erdal stopped at a utility pole in Chicago’s Grant Park, pulled out his cell phone and began pinching the screen. As she looked at the palm-sized map of the city, towering skyscrapers cut out the clear blue sky behind her. The researcher barely noticed the noise of city buses, cars and bicycles whizzing around her in the city’s crowded downtown. She was practicing something in the cool summer air. Fixed to a pole above her was one of the city’s new solar-powered…
Hospitals generate huge amounts of plastic waste every day, much of it from single-use packaging. A single 600-bed hospital can generate approximately 42 tons of sterile wrap waste each year. A consortium of Dutch companies is working on converting this waste into usable materials. Waste management company Renewi has partnered with medical manufacturer Van Straten Medical, O&M Halyard Europe and circulation specialist GreenCycle to transform single-use sterilization wrap into high-quality 3D printing filament. Blue polypropylene wrap, also known as BlueWrap, is used to maintain the sterility of surgical instruments, medical equipment, and patient gowns before surgery. Traditionally, it is incinerated…
North Carolina Health News, by Rose Hoban and Will Atwater. June 25, 2026 Written by Rose Hoban and Will Atwater Important points: The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Chemours in federal charges over years of PFAS contamination in three states, including North Carolina. North Carolina is likely to receive almost nothing from the proposed settlement, even though it is home to the only GenX production facility in the United States. Since 2017, North Carolina has pursued enforcement action against Chemours. We continue to pursue responsibility. In a surprising move, the U.S.…
On Thursday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are introducing an updated version of their bill that would allow physicians board-certified in addiction medicine to prescribe methadone directly to patients and pick it up at pharmacies. Currently, methadone is available as a treatment for addiction only in about 2,000 specialty clinics. Many of those programs required patients to attend clinics in person each day to receive methadone doses. Federal reforms enacted in 2024 allow these facilities, known as opioid treatment programs (OTPs), to be more flexible with patients, but it remains unclear how meaningfully the patient experience…
Daniel is responsible for the interface between the healthcare industry and the federal government. He reports on corporate influence in government, the health impacts of federal policy, and health care policy. Sensitive information can be sent via Signal (danielp.100).SAN DIEGO — These are unusual times for the vaccine business. But in the view of those gathered at the BIO International Conference this week, the picture is anything but bleak. In fact, some vaccine makers feel more optimistic than they were a year ago, at least given the circumstances. In an interview with STAT, they acknowledged that Secretary of Health and…
Approximately 40% of adults worldwide suffer from osteopenia, or loss of bone density. This condition is very common, especially in postmenopausal women and the elderly. It is estimated that over 500,000 fractures occur in the UK each year as a result of low bone density. Osteopenia itself usually does not cause any symptoms and progresses silently over time. Many people may not even know they have the disease until they experience a fracture or undergo a bone density test, which is usually recommended due to risk factors such as age or menopause. Osteopenia is therefore a significant but often under-recognized…
NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, which provides domain-specific tools and skills for the agenttic life sciences era. Image credit: NVIDIA This toolkit includes over a decade’s worth of NVIDIA life science libraries, tools, and open models that enable AI agents, scientists, and labs to work together by gathering evidence, reasoning about findings, running computational experiments, and recommending next-best steps to accelerate discovery. It gives any agent or AI platform, from general-purpose assistants to specialized scientific agents, software platforms, and in-house biopharmaceutical systems, the tools they need to synthesize and summarize scientific knowledge, invoke models, evaluate results, make…
Even relatively small asteroids can have surprisingly checkered histories. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft recently revealed that asteroid Donald Johansson is a wobbly, peanut-shaped object that was shaped by impacts, sunlight, and even a brief encounter with liquid water in the past. This asteroid was formed about 155 million years ago when debris from a violent collision gradually came together. Since then, subtle but persistent forces generated by sunlight have altered the rotation, leaving traces of ancient water on the rock’s surface. On April 20, 2025, Lucy passed within 650 miles of Donald Johansson while passing through the main asteroid belt on…
Maternal blood cell-free DNA methylation provides a minimally invasive research window into prenatal epigenetic features associated with late-stage autism diagnosis and may support future biomarker and early intervention studies. WGBS of cfDNA in a prospective autism cohort study enables prenatal detection of ASD-associated differentially methylated regions (DMRs). This experimental diagram details the process of selecting study participants for cfDNA sampling, subsequent diagnostic follow-up, and computational methods for interrogating WGBS data for DMRs related to ASD diagnosis. Williams, L. (2026) In recent research, communication biology We investigated whether cell-free DNA (cfDNA) methylation patterns in maternal blood can help identify prenatal epigenomic…
Tecan, a global provider of laboratory automation and solutions, today announced that it has leveraged the NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit to integrate Agentic AI capabilities into its laboratory analysis platform Introspect. The NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit gives AI agents direct access to scientific AI capabilities within the Introspect platform to help optimize lab operations. Agentic AI allows laboratories to move beyond traditional monitoring and reactive troubleshooting to proactive actions that prevent problems before they impact performance, quality, or scientific output. Get early access to the enhanced Introspect platform, with applications focused on pharmaceutical, biotech, and clinical laboratory environments. A collaborative…