Brain
They make our cars more environmentally friendly and they are indispensable for the chemical industry: catalysts make certain chemical reactions possible - such as the conversion of CO into CO2 in car exhaust gases - that would otherwise happen very slowly or not at all. Surface physicists at the TU Wien have now achieved an important breakthrough; metal atoms can be placed on a metal oxide surface so that they show exactly the desired chemical behavior. Promising results with iridium atoms have just been published in the renowned journal Angewandte Chemie.
Securing enough energy to meet human needs is one of the greatest challenges society has ever faced. Previously reliable sources--oil, gas and coal--are degrading air quality, devastating land and ocean and altering the fragile balance of the global climate, through the release of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, earth's rapidly industrializing population is projected to reach 10 billion by 2050. Clean alternatives are a matter of urgent necessity.
Paris, France - 31 Aug 2019: Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels should be lowered as much as possible to prevent cardiovascular disease, especially in high and very high risk patients. That's one of the main messages of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and European Atherosclerosis Society (EAS) Guidelines on dyslipidaemias published online today in European Heart Journal,(1) and on the ESC website.(2)
The compressive strength of concrete -- is achieved 28 days after pouring -- has increased by 2.7 - 3.3 times (B60) compared with traditional concrete mixtures of similar components. Frost-resistance is increased three times up to F600 from F200. Water-resistance (the pressure under which water permeate a concrete) increased more than four times -- W18 instead of W4.
An international team of scientists, studying evidence preserved in speleothems in a coastal cave, illustrate that more than three million years ago - a time in which the Earth was two to three degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial era - sea level was as much as 16 meters higher than the present day. Their findings represent significant implications for understanding and predicting the pace of current-day sea level rise amid a warming climate.
Irvine, Calif., Aug. 30, 2019 : With the use of ultra-high-speed videography, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Associate Professor Emanuel Azizi and colleagues from Occidental College Los Angeles have shed light on the hunting mechanism of the cone snail Conus catus. Published online in Current Biology - Cell Press, the researchers identified the snail's hydraulically propelled feeding structure as the quickest movement among mollusks by an order of magnitude.
MIT's fleet of robotic boats has been updated with new capabilities to "shapeshift," by autonomously disconnecting and reassembling into a variety of configurations, to form floating structures in Amsterdam's many canals.
ITHACA, N.Y. - A common problem in diagnosing infectious disease is that the presence of a potential pathogen in the body does not necessarily mean the patient is sick. This can be particularly challenging for the treatment of organ transplant recipients, who often grapple with infection as well as complications related to immunosuppression.
Hurricane Dorian is packing heavy rain as it moves toward the Bahamas as predicted by NOAA's NHC or National Hurricane Center. NASA analyzed the storm and found heavy rainfall in the storm.
MADISON -- In early mammalian development, timing is everything.
For healthy development to occur -- whether it be three weeks for a mouse or nine months for a human -- embryos follow the lead of oscillating genes, which turn on and off in precise cycles and trigger different development milestones. Oscillating genes are conductors keeping time in a symphony of growth.
PHILADELPHIA - Giving trauma patients with severe blood loss the hormone arginine vasopressin (AVP) cut the volume of blood products required to stabilize them by half, according to results of a new, first-of-its-kind clinical trial from Penn Medicine. The finding, published online this week in JAMA Surgery, suggests that administering AVP to trauma patients with severe bleeding could become standard practice in trauma care, reducing the use of blood products and their adverse side effects.
ITHACA, N.Y. - Ever-widening divisions between Democrats and Republicans are believed to reflect deeply rooted ideological differences, but a new study points to a radically different interpretation: it may be mostly a matter of luck.
In a new study, scientists led by the U.S. Military HIV Research Program (MHRP) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research identified a transcriptional signature in B cells associated with protection from SIV or HIV infection in five independent trials of HIV-1 vaccine candidates. The gene expression signature was found to correlate with protection in the only human HIV vaccine trial that previously showed modest efficacy, RV144. Results from the study were published today in Science Translational Medicine.
Scientists have found evidence that the horizontal circulation of carbon-rich ocean water in the subpolar Southern Ocean works in tandem with vertical circulation, together controlling how much carbon the region stores in the deep ocean or releases to the atmosphere. These findings contradict the conventional framework for carbon cycling in Antarctic waters, which primarily attributes carbon uptake to vertical circulation while overlooking the contribution of large systems of swirling ocean current called gyres.
New research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill compares the growth rates between nearshore and offshore corals in the Belize Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, the world's second-largest reef system. While nearshore corals have historically grown faster than those offshore, over the past decade there was a decline in the growth rates of two types of nearshore corals, while offshore coral growth rates in the same reef system stayed the same.