Culture
Autonomous systems are affecting virtually all aspects of society, so future designs must be guided by a broad range of societal stakeholders. That’s according to a new report led by scientists in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.
December 2, 2020 -- The first U.S. Executive Order of the 2017 travel ban targeting individuals from Muslim majority countries may be associated with preterm births for women from those countries residing in the U.S., according to a new study conducted at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The research also showed that structurally xenophobic and racist policies in the U.S. may have a harmful effect on early life indicators of life-long health outcomes. The findings are published on line in the journal Social Science and Medicine.
Plants get bacterial infections, just as humans do. When food crops and trees are infected, their yield and quality can suffer. Although some compounds have been developed to protect plants, few of them work on a wide variety of crops, and bacteria are developing resistance. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have modified natural plant alkaloids into new compounds that kill bacteria responsible for diseases in rice, kiwi and citrus.
Declines in blue-collar jobs may have left some working-class men frustrated by unmet job expectations and more likely to suffer an early death by suicide or drug poisoning, according to a study led by sociologists at The University of Texas at Austin.
Second- and thirdhand tobacco smoke have received lots of attention, but much less is known about the compounds deposited on surfaces from cannabis smoke. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have discovered that ozone --a component of outdoor and indoor air -- can react with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of cannabis, on glass or cotton surfaces to produce new compounds, which they characterized for the first time.
Lacking vaccines, countries have relied on multiple non-pharmaceutical interventions to control COVID-19 transmission. Despite the urging of the World Health Organization (WHO) in March to "test, test, and test," policy makers disagree on on how much testing is optimal. A new study, by Ravindra Prasan Rannan-Eliya and coauthors from the Institute for Health Policy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, uses data from multiple online sources to quantify testing impact on COVID-19 transmissibility in 173 countries and territories (accounting for 99 percent of the world's cases) between March and June 2020.
The tree of life describes the evolution of life and seeks to define the relationships between species. Likewise, the tree of cell types aims to organize cells in the brain into groups and describe their relationships to each other.
WASHINGTON--Roly poly bugs may be a source of fun for kids and adults but these little bugs that form into balls at the slightest touch are causing problems for some threatened fish.
New research finds steelhead trout in a stream on the California coast accumulate mercury in their bodies when the fish eat roly polies and similar terrestrial bugs that fall into local waterways. The new study corroborates earlier findings that mercury can make its way to the top of the food chain in coastal California.
WASHINGTON--The global collapse of frogs and other amphibians due to the amphibian chytrid fungus exacerbated malaria outbreaks in Costa Rica and Panama during the 1990s and 2000s, according to new research.
The findings provide the first evidence that amphibian population declines have directly affected human health and show how preserving biodiversity can benefit humans as well as local ecosystems.
DETROIT (December 2, 2020) - The use of telemedicine services has shown to be exceptionally effective in meeting the health care needs of patients throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. But an analysis by Henry Ford Health System found that socioeconomic factors may affect certain patient populations on how they use the technology for accessing care.
The Suzuki cross-coupling reaction is a widely used technique for combining organic compounds and synthesizing complex chemicals for industrial or pharmaceutical applications. The process requires the use of palladium (Pd) catalysts and, as of today, two main types of Pd-based materials are used in practice as heterogeneous catalysts.
NEWPORT, Ore. - Fish are thriving and poachers are staying out of marine protected areas around California's Channel Islands, a new population analysis by an Oregon State University researcher shows.
One Friday evening in 1992, a meteorite ended a more than 150 million-mile journey by smashing into the trunk of a red Chevrolet Malibu in Peekskill, New York. The car's owner reported that the 30-pound remnant of the earliest days of our solar system was still warm and smelled of sulfur.
Nearly 30 years later, a new analysis of that same Peekskill meteorite and 17 others by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has led to a new hypothesis about how asteroids formed during the early years of the solar system.
A new machine learning algorithm is poised to help urban transportation analysts relieve bottlenecks and chokepoints that routinely snarl city traffic.
The tool, called TranSEC, was developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to help urban traffic engineers get access to actionable information about traffic patterns in their cities.