Culture
Imagine a 7-year-old and a college student both take a break from their virtual classes to get a drink of water. When they return, the 7-year-old has difficulty restarting the assignment, while the college student resumes working as if the break never occurred. Nelson Cowan, an expert in working memory at the University of Missouri, believes understanding this developmental age difference can help younger children and their parents to better adjust to a virtual learning environment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
WASHINGTON, DC - Investigators leading the Lung Cancer Master Protocol, or Lung-MAP trial, will present findings from three translational medicine studies at the 2020 World Conference on Lung Cancer, to be held online January 28-31, 2021.
Plastic is ubiquitous in people's lives. Yet, when plastic-containing items have fulfilled their missions, only a small amount is recycled into new products, which are often of lower quality compared to the original material. And, transforming this waste into high-value chemicals requires substantial energy. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' JACS Au have combined a ruthenium-carbon catalyst and mild, lower-energy reaction conditions to convert plastics used in bottles and other packaging into fuels and chemical feedstock.
What makes cancer cells different from ordinary cells in our bodies? Can these differences be used to strike at them and paralyze their activity? Cancer researchers have been debating this question since the mid-19th century.
Cells don't express all the genes they contain all the time. The portion of our genome that encodes eye color, for example, doesn't need to be turned on in liver cells. In plants, genes encoding the structure of a flower can be turned off in cells that will form a leaf.
These unneeded genes are kept from becoming active by being stowed in dense chromatin, a tightly packed bundle of genetic material laced with proteins.
Gardeners and farmers around the country recognize that crop varieties grow best in certain regions. Most plant species have adapted to their local environments; for example, crop and ornamental seeds sold for the upper Midwest are often very different than those bred for Texas. Identifying and breeding varieties that have high productivity across a range of environments is becoming increasingly important for food, fuel and other applications, and breeders aren't interested in waiting decades to develop new crops.
The development of cost-efficient, portable microscopy units would greatly expand their use in remote field locations and in places with fewer resources, potentially leading to easier on-site analysis of contaminants such as E. coli in water sources as well as other practical applications.
In September, a team led by astronomers in the United Kingdom announced that they had detected the chemical phosphine in the thick clouds of Venus. The team's reported detection, based on observations by two Earth-based radio telescopes, surprised many Venus experts. Earth's atmosphere contains small amounts of phosphine, which may be produced by life. Phosphine on Venus generated buzz that the planet, often succinctly touted as a "hellscape," could somehow harbor life within its acidic clouds.
By Elton Alisson | Agência FAPESP – Melatonin synthesized in the lungs acts as a barrier against SARS-CoV-2, preventing expression of genes that encode proteins in cells such as resident macrophages in the nose and pulmonary alveoli, and epithelial cells lining the alveoli, all of which are entry points for the virus. The hormone, therefore, prevents infection of these cells by the virus and inhibits the immune response so that the virus remains in the respiratory tract for a few days, eventually leaving to find another host.
A study led by a University of Illinois Chicago researcher uses a new approach to measure precarious, or low-quality, employment in the United States. And, according to those findings, precarious employment has increased 9% between 1988 and 2016.
Precarious employment, or P.E., is defined as low-quality employment, which is often characterized by low wages, job insecurity and irregular hours, making employment risky and stressful for the worker.
For the last century, seismic building codes and practices have primarily focused on saving lives by reducing the likelihood of significant damage or structural collapse. Recovery of critical functions provided by buildings and infrastructure have received less attention, however. As a result, many remain vulnerable to being knocked out of service by an earthquake for months, years or for good.
Amid a sharp economic downturn in 2008, police departments around the United States experienced budget shortfalls that required them to enact cutbacks. A new study examined the effects on crime of budget shortfalls in two New Jersey cities--one of which laid off more than 10 percent of its police force while the other averted layoffs. The study found that the police layoffs were associated with significant increases in overall crime, violent crime, and property crime.
DALLAS (January 26, 2021) - Many people believe that they can't change their brains, or that their brain health will inevitably decline as they age. But the Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART) training protocol, created by researchers and clinicians at the Center for BrainHealth®, has been demonstrated over the past two decades to improve cognitive function and psychological well-being in laboratory participants.
Popular folklore and anecdotal evidence suggest that people in a hypnotic or suggestible state can experience sensory hallucinations, such as perceiving sounds and sights that are not actually there. Reliable scientific evidence of these experiences, however, has been notoriously challenging to obtain because of their subjective nature.
27th of January, Wednesday, Hong Kong - Deep Longevity, a fully-owned subsidiary of Regent Pacific (HKEX: 0575), specializing in the development and the application of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) for aging and longevity research, today announced the publication of an article in Nature Aging titled "Artificial Intelligence in Longevity Medicine"..