Latest news with #UniversityofTexasatDallas
Mint
3 days ago
- Business
- Mint
Chinese Students Ditch US Plans as Trump Vows Crackdown on Visas
The Trump administration's move to revoke visas for Chinese students is upending Anqi Dong's dream of a US education even before it starts. The 30-year-old Shanghai lawyer, who applied to a PhD program at the University of Texas at Dallas in January, is abandoning her plans, saying bad news for foreign students seems to be piling up by the day. 'Everything is looking just too uncertain right now in America,' she said. 'I'm now considering programs in Finland and Norway, which I never actually thought about before. These are rich and stable places.' Chinese students have found themselves at the sharp end of the Trump administration's push for greater scrutiny of foreigners at American universities. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday their visas would be 'aggressively' revoked, including for students with connections to the Communist Party or studying in critical fields. Future applications from China and Hong Kong will also face heightened scrutiny, he said. Taking action against people with links to the Communist Party casts a wide net, given the role it plays in the lives of Chinese people and institutions, including universities. While just under 100 million people are party members, its reach is so pervasive that the number of those who can be said to have ties with it runs into multiples of that figure. The moves are forcing Chinese students to seek alternatives, even as some education consultants urge patience in case the US policy shifts. Zhou Huiying, founder of Shanghai-based consultancy Lideyouwei Education Technology, said at least 30% of her clients have either canceled plans to study in the US or are applying to schools in places like Australia, the UK and Singapore as back ups. She believes that ratio may increase to about 50% if the Trump administration announces new restrictions on Chinese students. Typically, families that target America for higher education would only focus on US colleges and rarely look at universities in other nations, Zhou said, but now many are having second thoughts. 'The policies have been very capricious and really got on clients' nerves,' Zhou said. 'Some families, where the parents are Communist Party members working for the government, are pretty concerned and now abandoning the US as an option.' The visa restrictions extend a broader crackdown underway since President Trump returned to the White House. He's pledged to ban international students at Harvard University, escalating his campaign to force changes at the elite institution. Earlier this week, Rubio ordered US embassies worldwide to stop scheduling interviews for foreign student visas. For now, the situation is chaotic for students. While some education advisers suggest looking to other countries, others say ride out the bluster, others still have differing views on just how broad the crackdown will be. But just about all agree that there's a greater threat than before as tensions mount between the two nations in Trump's second term. Fangzhou Jiang, a Chinese student at Harvard Kennedy School and co-founder of college consulting company Crimson Education, said he is trying his best to remain optimistic. He said that after receiving the Harvard news last week, he has been mentally preparing for the worst. With one more semester left in his program, he has decided to keep his lease and not make any rash decisions. At Harvard, Jiang has been a model student — serving as a the Vice President of the Kennedy School Student Government. Still, he knows he has to be cautious. 'I'm still cautious because number one, I tick both boxes at the moment, right? Both Chinese and Harvard,' he said. 'I've got some big targets on my back. So I don't want to be blindly optimistic.' Trump has been throwing up successive roadblocks for Chinese students since he was elected the first time. His administration announced in 2020 that the Confucius Institute US Center, a program funded by the Chinese government that's dedicated to teaching Chinese language and culture in the US, had to register as a 'foreign mission.' That made it subject to administrative requirements similar to those for embassies and consulates. Later that year, the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese students and researchers were revoked. Some students are sticking with their US study plans, betting that Trump will eventually change course, said Dennis Huang, co-founder of Dream Education, which provides high-end overseas education services. 'Most of my clients are growing increasingly insusceptible toward the ever-changing policies and people are mentally prepared for the potential hiccups,' Huang said. 'It's not Trump's first presidential tenure and people have grown used to his fickle style.' Brian Wang, founder and chief executive officer of Blueprint, a global admissions consulting firm in Shanghai, thinks the restrictions will be limited to a subset of students who are targeted based on 'perceived political leanings,' or due to their links to sensitive academic subjects. Students already in the US should be 'vigilant about their behavior, including posts on social media,' he said. The number of Chinese students in the US declined 4% last year to about 277,000 amid increased tension between the two nations. Yet Chinese students are still the second-largest international group, trailing only India. In the 2023-2024 year, India and China accounted for about half of the 1.1 million global students in the country, according to the Institute of International Education. Dong, the Shanghai lawyer, doesn't expect to be joining those ranks anytime soon. The visa woes 'impact not only school life, but also plans for after graduation,' she said. 'It is highly likely that new rules would also negatively affect potential jobs.' With assistance from Allen Wan, Diana Li and Gabrielle Ng. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dutch scientists say universe will die sooner than expected
(NewsNation) — New research by Dutch scientists revealed that the universe is expected to die sooner than previously believed, according to new research. The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics' newest development comes after a pivotal revision from the previous estimate of 10 to the power of 1,100 years. Despite the change, scientists say people shouldn't be worried as the universe still has 10 to the power of 78 years before it happens — that's a one with 78 zeroes. 'We calculate the creation of virtual pairs of massless scalar particles in spherically symmetric asymptotically flat curved spacetimes,' said author Heino Falcke. 'This calculation is based on covariant perturbation theory with the quantum field representing, e.g., gravitons or photons.' Chances of asteroid hitting Earth in 2032 fluctuating but small Data from March 2025 showed a dark energy — a mysterious force that makes up nearly 70% of the universe — may be weakening. The idea of dark energy was first introduced by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity. 'Now, there is the possibility that everything comes to an end; would we consider that a good thing or a bad thing?' said Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, cosmologist and study collaborator at the University of Texas at Dallas. Scientists have also acknowledged that the sun in about a billion years will be too hot, leading to the boiling of our oceans. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Scientific American
14-05-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
Migraine Drug Ubrogepant Tackles Debilitating Early Symptoms
Scientists have shown that a drug approved to treat migraine headaches can also alleviate debilitating non-headache symptoms, such as fatigue, brain fog and blinding light sensitivity, that occur as the migraine is starting. The drug — called ubrogepant — is already known to stop the onset of a full-blown migraine attack in some people if they take it when the headache begins. But a phase III clinical trial, described in Nature Medicine on 12 May, shows that it can also tackle the 'prodrome' symptoms that arrive hours or even days earlier. The results suggest that ubrogepant could 'free patients from a disabling part of migraine,' says study co-author Peter Goadsby, a neuroscientist at King's College London. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Early intervention The process of a migraine starts long before the head pain, when brain circuits involving the hypothalamus — a region that regulates several vital bodily functions — become dysregulated. In the prodrome, or premonitory phase, people can experience various unpleasant symptoms, including fatigue, neck pain, an aversion to light (photophobia) or sound (phonophobia) and difficulty concentrating. 'Not enough attention has been given to prodrome symptoms,' says Goadsby. The trial aimed to 'fill this gap' by investigating whether ubrogepant has an effect on the initial stages of a migraine. The trial included 438 participants who could reliably identify incoming migraine attacks from their prodromal symptoms. During the 60 days of the trial, they took ubrogepant or a placebo whenever they felt any prodromal symptoms coming on, and reported whether doing this had any effect. The results suggest that for some participants, the drug increased their ability to concentrate one hour after treatment, reduced their photophobia two hours after treatment and reduced their fatigue and neck pain after three hours. But the 'effect sizes were small' and never more than 15 percentage points compared with the placebo, points out Gregory Dussor, a neuroscientist and migraine specialist at the University of Texas at Dallas. For example, 27% of participants who took ubrogepant reported an absence of fatigue, compared with 17% who took the placebo. Dussor suggests this modest improvement is because the class of drugs to which ubrogepant belongs is a 'life-changing therapeutic' for a minority of people — perhaps only one in five, according to some studies. It makes little difference to others, so its effect for that minority 'gets diluted in the data'. 'Nevertheless, this study answers the question of whether ubrogepant works when you dose it early in the migraine, when people feel prodromal symptoms coming on,' he says. Know your migraine Ubrogepant is already known to stop migraine headaches, but Goadsby says the data show that it works substantially better if taken in the prodromal stage rather than once the attack starts. In the trial, it was crucial that participants could predict their preliminary symptoms. 'People who know their migraine would benefit more from this medicine,' he says. The next challenge for the field, he adds, is to train people to understand their migraine symptoms so they can judge when to take ubrogepant. Dussor thinks that once the prodrome has begun, it is probably still too late for ubrogepant to block the migraine entirely. He says research should explore another question: 'Is there some way to alert people much earlier to take the drug, before they feel symptoms coming on?' The study could also provide clues about the cause of prodromal symptoms. Ubrogepant works by blocking receptors that bind to calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), a molecule that sensitizes the nerves in the head and skull during a migraine attack. 'Knowing there's some CGRP component earlier than the headache phase is important to know in our mechanistic understanding of migraine,' says Dussor.
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Scientists Say Shock Collar-Like Device Can Treat PTSD
Using a device that vaguely functions like a shock collar, researchers say they have found a promising way to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Neuroscientists at the University of Texas at Dallas and Baylor have developed a tiny chip that, when fitted inside a soft collar and placed just over the vagus nerve — a brain stem cluster that controls bodily functions like heart rate, digestion, immunity, and mood — elicits mild electric impulses that can help ease PTSD symptoms. The underlying concept behind vagus nerve stimulation, or VNS, is intriguing. Scientists believe that stimulating the nerve can help one's brain adapt and change on a neurological level. For years now, VNS has been used to treat everything from epilepsy and depression to sleep deprivation and tinnitus. Today, there are even handheld VNS devices on the market that allow people to mildly zap their brains at home. This new experimental treatment, however, diverges from prior VNS applications because it not only involves hyper-targeted nerve stimulation, but also works in tandem with a traditional talk therapy method known as "prolonged exposure therapy" or PET, in which PTSD survivors confront their traumatic memories in hopes of getting past them. In phase 1 trials, the Texan neurological researchers had nine patients complete a total of 12 sessions involving both vagus nerve stimulation and prolonged exposure therapy. After those sessions concluded, the patients went to four check-ins over a period of six months — and remarkably, all of their PTSD symptoms were gone by the end. In the school's press release, UT Dallas neuroscience professor and study leader Michael Kilgard said the results were "very promising" — despite a very small sample size. "In a trial like this, some subjects usually do get better, but rarely do they lose their PTSD diagnosis," Kilgard, who also co-authored a recent paper on the trial for the journal Brain Stimulation, said. "Typically, the majority will have this diagnosis for the rest of their lives. In this case, we had 100 percent loss of diagnosis." This advance in PTSD treatment could, according to Baylor clinical psychologist and paper coauthor Mark Powers, completely change the game. A veteran VNS researcher, Powers has seen the technology "dramatically" change his work on psychological trauma — and this latest study drives home how revolutionary it can be. "Our gold-standard treatments for PTSD have about an 85 percent response rate, with 40 percent no longer having their diagnosis, and a 20 percent dropout rate," the psychologist said. "Soon we could have the option of VNS for people who don't get better with cognitive behavioral therapy alone." More on brains: Scientists Scanned the Brains of Authoritarians and Found Something Weird
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Grand jury indicts 14 UT Dallas pro-Palestinian protesters, 7 have charges dismissed
The Brief 14 of the 21 people arrested last May after a pro-Palestinian protest on the UT Dallas campus have been indicted. They're now facing a misdemeanor charge of obstruction of a passageway. Charges were dropped against 7 of the people who were arrested. RICHARDSON, Texas - A Collin County grand jury indicted more than a dozen people because of last year's pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Texas at Dallas. What we know The grand jury decided to charge 14 of the 21 people who were arrested in May. Prosecutors said they built an encampment with tents, tarps, wooden structures, tires, chains, and other materials on the UTD campus. The university asked them to remove the structures because they were blocking pedestrian walkways. Some protesters refused to clear the area and instead locked arms. They were arrested for criminal trespassing. After reviewing the evidence, the grand jury charged them with obstruction of a passageway, which is a Class B misdemeanor. All charges were dropped against seven of the protesters. What they're saying "Free speech is protected. Blocking access and refusing lawful commands is not," said District Attorney Greg Willis. "These charges reflect that a clear line exists between protest and unlawful disruption." What we don't know The DA's office didn't release information about why some of the charges were dismissed. The Source The information in this story comes from the Collin County District Attorney's Office.
