Brain
Walking is one of our most natural, daily actions. Now, a new study led by a Tohoku University researcher suggests that walkers use step synchronization as a form of non-verbal social communication. The results lend credence to the effects of psychological traits on movement interaction between humans.
Published in PLOS ONE, the study results demonstrate how people's traits and first impression affect their nonverbal communication, i.e. synchronous walking.
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 21, 2020 - Skipping IV clot-busters and using mechanical clot removal alone for strokes may be just as good as the combination of both treatments, with less risk of brain bleeding, according to late breaking science presented today at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2020. The conference, Feb. 19-21 in Los Angeles, is a world premier meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science of stroke and brain health.
CHICAGO (February 21, 2020): Colon cancer is more likely to be lethal in children and young adults than middle-aged adults.
Resistance to antibiotics has been declared a global health emergency – and it’s not just humans who are impacted by this public health crisis. Antibiotics used in food-producing animals contribute to the development of bacteria that are resistant to treatment, impacting animal health and potentially human health.
A special issue of Animal Health Research Reviews turns the spotlight on the science underlying this growing crisis - looking at the evidence base for using antibiotics to prevent illness in beef and dairy cattle, swine, and broiler poultry.
A new article by the Oxidative Stress and Cell Cycle research group at UPF identifies the main strategy of cells to deal with the accumulation of misfolded proteins. In the paper, published today in the journal Cell Reports, the Schizosaccharomyces pombe yeast model has been used to investigate the protein quality control process. The study was led by Elena Hidalgo, and postdoctoral researchers Margarita Cabrera and Susanna Boronat are its first authors.
When carbonate rocks weather, karst landscapes are formed. The groundwater reserves in these layers of earth currently supply 10 to 20 percent of the world population with drinking water. So far, however, researchers have not been able to precisely determine the amount of water present in karst regions. The reason for this is that the computational models cannot adequately capture the special features of hydrological processes in karst regions without observational data. As a result, reliable information for sustainable water management is often lacking.
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 20, 2020 -- A brain stent appears safe and effective for reducing the risk of recurrent stroke in patients with cholesterol-clogged brain arteries, according to late breaking science presented today at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2020. The conference, Feb. 19-21 in Los Angeles, is a world premier meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science of stroke and brain health.
AMHERST, Mass. ¬- In a new paper, climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution propose that massive amounts of melting sea ice in the Arctic drained into the North Atlantic and disrupted climate-steering currents, thus playing an important role in causing past abrupt climate change after the last Ice Age, from about 8,000 to 13,000 years ago. Details of how they tested this idea for the first time are online now in Geology.
New work shows how using next-generation DNA sequencing on ancient packrat middens--nests made out of plant material, fragments of insects, bones, fecal matter, and urine--could provide ecological snapshots of Earth's past. Published today in the journal Ecology and Evolution, the study may pave the way for scientists to better understand how plant communities--and possibly animals, bacteria, and fungi as well--will respond to human-caused climate change.
LA JOLLA, CALIF. - Feb. 20, 2020 - Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and Harvard University have discovered that mitochondria trigger senescence, the sleep-like state of aged cells, through communication with the cell's nucleus--and identified an FDA-approved drug that helped suppress the damaging effects of the condition in cells and mice.
Researchers at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, with colleagues from Poland and China used liquid crystal elastomer technology to demonstrate a rotary micromotor powered with light. The 5-millimeter diameter ring, driven and controlled by a laser beam, can rotate and perform work, e.g. by rotating another element installed on the same axis.
Using mindfulness training as a cognitive enhancement tool, two new studies from University of Miami researchers show that firefighters and soldiers who participated in short-form mindfulness training programs tailored for their respective professional contexts, benefited from improved attention and resilience. These benefits, the researchers argue, better equip these professionals to manage stressors on the frontlines of their high-demand occupations.
As social beliefs and values change over time, scientists have struggled with effectively communicating the facts of their research with the public. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Missouri and the University of Colorado believe scientists can gain trust with their audience by showing their human side. The researchers say it can be as simple as using "I" and first-person narratives to help establish a personal connection with the audience.
At the Department for Materials of the ETH in Zurich, Pietro Gambardella and his collaborators investigate tomorrow's memory devices. They should be fast, retain data reliably for a long time and also be cheap. So-called magnetic "random access memories" (MRAM) achieve this quadrature of the circle by combining fast switching via electric currents with durable data storage in magnetic materials. A few years ago researchers could already show that a certain physical effect - the spin-orbit torque - makes particularly fast data storage possible.
Coherence in quantum dynamics is at the heart of fascinating phenomena beyond the realm of classical physics, such as quantum interference effects, entanglement production and geometric phases.
Quantum processes of inherent dynamical nature defy a description in terms of an equilibrium statistical physics ensemble. Up to now, to identify general principles behind the underlying unitary quantum dynamics which preserve quantum coherence remains a key challenge.