Brain
Structural damage to any of the nation's ailing bridges can come with a hefty price of billions of dollars in repairs. New bridge designs promise more damage-resistant structures and, consequently, lower restoration costs. But if these designs haven't been implemented in the real world, predicting how they can be damaged and what repair strategies should be implemented remain unresolved.
HOUSTON - (Oct. 26, 2020) - Engineers at Rice University and Texas A&M University have found a 2D material that could make computers faster and more energy-efficient.
Their material is a derivative of perovskite -- a crystal with a distinctive structure -- that has the surprising ability to enable the valleytronics phenomenon touted as a possible platform for information processing and storage.
Seabirds arrived on the remote cluster of islands in the South Atlantic known as the Falkland Islands 5,000 years ago. Their arrival occurred at the same time as the region cooled.
Coincidence?
A UCLA-led review of nine years of social media posts with the hashtag #BCSM suggests that Twitter can be a useful resource not only for patients, but also for physicians and researchers.
The hashtag -- an initialism for "breast cancer social media" -- first appeared on Twitter in 2011. Created by two cancer survivors, it was used to curate a weekly informational chat for people with breast cancer. Dr. Deanna Attai became one of the group's moderators a few weeks later.
MADISON, Wis. -- Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered a way to control the growth of twisting, microscopic spirals of materials just one atom thick.
The continuously twisting stacks of two-dimensional materials built by a team led by UW-Madison chemistry Professor Song Jin create new properties that scientists can exploit to study quantum physics on the nanoscale. The researchers published their work today in the journal Science.
Virologists at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) have identified a critical role played by a cellular protein in the progression of Hepatitis C virus infection, paving the way for more effective treatment. No vaccine currently exists for Hepatitis C virus infection, which affects more than 130 million people worldwide and nearly 250,000 Canadians. Antivirals exist but are expensive and not readily available in developing countries, where the disease is most prevalent.
University of Kent research has found that when individuals feel that a system or authority is unresponsive to their demands, they are more likely to legitimise hacker activity at an organisation's expense.
WASHINGTON - U.S. Naval Research Laboratory researchers evaluated commercial ultraviolet (UV) sources for viral disinfection to combat COVID-19 on land and at sea, and established a dedicated UV characterization lab in five days to ensure safe introduction and effective operation of UV sources across the Fleet.
The Navy is investigating UV-C band (UVC) light as a potential disinfection technique for niche applications against COVID-19 for materiel going onto a ship, for common use areas on a ship, and general room disinfection on ships or shore facilities.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Novel grafted plants -- consisting of rootstock epigenetically modified to "believe" it has been under stress -- joined to an unmodified scion, or above-ground shoot, give rise to progeny that are more vigorous, productive and resilient than the parental plants.
The cultivation of vanilla in Madagascar provides a good income for small-holder farmers, but without trees and bushes the plantations can lack biodiversity. Agricultural ecologists from the University of Göttingen, in cooperation with colleagues from the University in Antananarivo (Madagascar), have investigated the interaction between prey and their predators in these cultivated areas. To do this, they experimentally released dummy prey in order to determine the activity of the natural enemies. The result: more prey were attacked as the proportion of trees increased.
In patients initiating continuous renal replacement therapy for acute kidney injury, higher serum creatinine-to-cystatin C ratios were associated with lower mortality.
DURHAM, N.C. -- Transcription factor proteins are the light switches of the human genome. By binding to DNA, they help turn genes "on" or "off" and start the important process of copying DNA into an RNA template that acts as a blueprint for a new protein.
By being choosy about which genes they turn on, transcription factors determine which rooms in the house are lighted and which aren't, or rather, which components of a person's genome are activated.
In research, the results of studies must be precise and reproducible. For this reason, researchers carried out experiments under strictly standardized laboratory conditions. However, despite the high standards applied, results from individual studies cannot always be reproduced in practice. Especially in cases in which animals are used for research purposes and the original study cannot be repeated, this raises severe ethical questions. For a long time now, researchers have been debating this aspect under the heading "reproducibility crisis".
The Gerontological Society of America's highly cited, peer-reviewed journals are continuing to publish scientific articles on COVID-19. The following were published between October 8 and 21; all are free to access:
Taking steroid inhalers or tablets to treat asthma or control flare-ups is linked to a heightened risk of brittle bones (osteoporosis) and increased vulnerability to broken bones (fragility fractures), finds research published online in the journal Thorax.
The higher the cumulative dose, and the longer the period of treatment, the greater these risks seem to be, indicate the findings.