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Residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities regularly leave for doctor appointments or recreational trips, but these outings lack the safety documentation that hospital admissions get. Researchers developed and piloted a sign-in/sign-out form called MASS that family members and transport staff fill out after each outing to flag falls, health changes, or other problems. The form brings escorts and receptionists into the care team and creates a paper trail that facilities can use to spot and prevent recurring problems.

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This randomized trial enrolled over 2,000 people with dementia and their caregivers across four U.S. sites to compare care managed by a nurse practitioner or physician assistant, care managed by a social worker or therapist through a community organization, and usual care. Neither structured approach reduced patients' behavioral symptoms or caregiver strain compared to standard care, and the two programs performed equally with each other. The one meaningful difference was that caregivers in both programs felt more confident managing care than those in the usual-care group.

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A large randomized trial tested whether structured dementia care programs—one run through health systems, one through community organizations—improved outcomes for people with dementia and their caregivers compared to standard care. Neither program improved patients' thinking, function, or quality of life, and neither reduced overall caregiver burden. Caregivers in both programs were more satisfied with the care they received and felt better supported, even though the clinical outcomes did not change.

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Even with best-practice guidelines in hand, nursing home staff face real obstacles putting them into practice. Through surveys and a focus group with 39 experts, researchers identified that patient safety, staff workload, communication gaps, and limited resources all create barriers—while strong staff communication and clear protocols act as facilitators. Most experts agreed that federal or state regulations would not improve care and that flexible, regularly updated recommendations work better than rigid rules.

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Nursing home and assisted living residents make frequent brief outings—room changes, recreational trips, medical appointments—that carry real safety risks but have no established guidelines. A panel of 39 experts used a structured consensus process to develop 51 agreed-upon recommendations covering communication, safety preparation, equipment, and escort skill level. This is the first formal guidance for staff managing these short transitions, and following it could reduce falls and unnecessary emergency department visits.

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The D-CARE trial needed to enroll over 2,000 diverse patient-caregiver pairs for a pragmatic dementia care study, with most recruitment happening after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Sites primarily used electronic health record searches and clinician outreach to identify eligible patients. The trial successfully enrolled a racially and ethnically diverse sample, showing that academic health systems can recruit representative populations for dementia research even under difficult conditions.

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Hospital discharges and nursing home admissions get careful clinical attention, but brief outings like doctor appointments or recreational trips from long-term care facilities do not, even though they carry similar risks. The authors coin the term "microtransitions" for these short, nonurgent patient movements and argue they deserve the same systematic attention as major transfers. They call for formal recognition, standardized protocols, and practical implementation steps to prevent falls, medication errors, and other avoidable harms.

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Recruiting older adults with dementia and their caregivers for research is hard under normal circumstances; the COVID-19 pandemic made it harder. Researchers tested multiple strategies to enroll caregiver pairs in a sensor-based study of cognitive change and found that distributing flyers with home-delivered meals produced the most enrollments at the lowest cost—46 of 117 pairs at under $25 per pair in non-labor costs. The total study cost about $3,100 per enrolled pair, and community partnerships were the key to hitting enrollment goals.

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Researchers surveyed two mountain ranges in far West Texas to see whether ticks carrying Rickettsia parkeri—a bacteria that causes a spotted fever illness—were present in that region. They collected 43 ticks from vegetation and a road-killed deer and found that 8 tested positive for R. parkeri. The findings extend the known range of this tick-borne pathogen deeper into Texas and put hikers, researchers, and border personnel in those mountains at potential risk.

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Many dementia care programs exist, but no rigorous study had compared health-system-based and community-based approaches head to head or against standard care. D-CARE was designed as an 18-month, three-arm randomized trial at four U.S. sites to fill that gap, with behavioral symptoms and caregiver strain as the primary outcomes. The trial also planned to measure cost-effectiveness using Medicare claims, addressing a key gap for health systems deciding how to invest in dementia care.

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Fifty young adult women wore accelerometers for a week so researchers could measure how much time they spent sitting, doing light activity, and doing moderate-to-vigorous exercise—then looked at whether those patterns predicted heart and metabolic health markers. Sitting time and light activity were both linked to triglycerides and a fat-distribution measure, but those links weakened once fitness level and body composition were accounted for. Light activity—not just vigorous exercise—was independently tied to lower triglycerides and better insulin sensitivity, suggesting that simply moving more throughout the day matters for young women's heart health.

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In dye-sensitized solar cells, electrons must jump from a dye molecule into the metal oxide electrode fast enough to beat energy loss, but not so fast that excess recombination cancels the gain. Experiments showed that the electrolyte composition slows electron injection to about 150 picoseconds—20 times slower than without electrolyte—because it shifts the electrode's energy levels. This "just fast enough" injection rate turned out to be optimal: it preserved high efficiency while minimizing the wasted energy from electrons recombining before they could do useful work.

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Researchers used laser pulses and optical measurements to track how electrons in titanium dioxide films react with iodine in the electrolyte used in dye-sensitized solar cells. The results showed the reaction is first-order in iodine concentration and that electron trapping within the oxide—not a two-step reaction mechanism—best explains the observed kinetics. A computer simulation incorporating electron diffusion through trap states reproduced the experimental data, clarifying the mechanism that limits solar cell efficiency.

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Dye-sensitized solar cells can use different metal oxides as electrodes; this study compared titanium dioxide and tin dioxide to understand why tin dioxide cells underperform despite faster electron movement. Tin dioxide moved electrons 100 times faster and shifted energy levels in a way that caused rapid recombination—electrons were lost back to the dye and electrolyte before they could generate current. Adding a magnesium oxide coating reduced one type of recombination loss but could not fix the fundamental problem, showing that faster is not always better in solar cell design.