Culture
Fine particulate matter (PM2.5), the tiny particles responsible for hazy air pollution, are detrimental to children's health even inside the classroom. Mounting evidence has linked chronic exposure with poor academic performance in K-12 students. Until now, no research had examined the impact of "peak" air pollution events, the 24-hour spikes of extremely high PM2.5 levels.
SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer - Although cities and urban areas only make up a small proportion of the world's land mass, they are home to more than half the global population and that number is going to keep rising. As cities swell to capacity with more and more inhabitants, city planners have turned to technology to cope with the challenges that accompany urban density.
SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer - On a fateful April night ten years ago, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded - taking the lives of 11 crew members and triggering the largest marine oil spill in history. Nearly five million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, polluting around 2,100 kilometres of shoreline and killing thousands of marine mammals.
Urban legends about the origins of canal grass in Panama abound, but the Smithsonian has new evidence that puts the question to rest. Canal grass is an invasive weed, native to Asia. Because its tiny seeds blow in the wind, it readily invades clearings and spreads to form impenetrable stands by budding from tillers and rhizomes. Once established, canal grass is challenging to eliminate. Fire burns the tops and stimulates the roots. Glassy hairs edging its leaf blades cut skin and dull machetes.
CHICAGO --- After recovering from COVID-19, some patients are left with chronic, debilitating pain, numbness or weakness in their hands, feet, arms and legs due to unexplained nerve damage. A new Northwestern Medicine study shows how advanced imaging technology can pinpoint what may have caused patients' nerve damage and help determine the best course of treatment.
When healthcare professionals treat patients suffering from advanced cancers, they usually need to use a combination of different therapies. In addition to cancer surgery, the patients are often treated with radiation therapy, medication, or both.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- An inexpensive, FDA-approved drug -- cholestyramine -- taken in conjunction with an antibiotic prevents the antibiotic from driving antimicrobial resistance, according to new research by scientists at Penn State and the University of Michigan. The team's findings appear today (Dec. 1) in the journal eLife.
Lockdowns, job losses and social isolation have been the hallmarks of 2020 as COVID-19 tightens its grip on the world, not only infecting millions and leaving a mounting death toll, but also denying humans the most basic sense - touch.
In the absence of human-to-human contact, in millions of households worldwide, animals have stepped into the breach for many people, providing much-needed comfort via cuddles, pats and a constant physical presence.
New Rochelle, NY, November 30, 2020--A standardized "Artificial Pancreas (AP) Dashboard" should provide easy to use single-page hybrid closed-loop system (HCL) reporting for insulin requiring patients with diabetes. The AP Dashboard will help standardize HCL reporting similar to standardized CGM reporting and an electrocardiogram (EKG) and will be likely to help improve glycemic control and reduce hypoglycemia. It is described in the peer-reviewed journal Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics (DTT).
Anecdotal reports claim that the incidence of cancer in sharks is very low, but there is not enough data to confirm this estimate categorically. A study published in the journal Genomics, however, presents strong evidence of anti-tumor activity in the genome of the Shortfin mako shark, Isurus oxyrinchus.
Defensive behaviours are common responses when people feel personally attacked but can undermine our ability to identify problems and find solutions.
Addressing why defensiveness manifests will help relationships, conflict management and decision making to reduce defensiveness meet people's psychological need for belonging, according to a study.
Research published in the British Journal of Social Psychology has shown that defensiveness in response to wrongdoing is exacerbated by making the wrong doer feel like they're an outcast.
A repurposed mouse model can develop symptoms of both severe COVID-19 (lung damage, blood clots, abnormal blood vessels, and death) and also of milder disease, including loss of the sense of smell, according to a recent University of Iowa study published in Nature.
The study also showed that convalescent plasma from a patient who had recovered from COVID-19 protected the mice against lethal disease. The findings suggest the K18-hACE2 mouse model is useful for understanding a spectrum of COVID-19 disease symptoms, and for developing and testing new treatments.
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed new and improved probes, known as positive controls, that could make it easier to validate rapid, point-of-care diagnostic tests for COVID-19 across the globe.
The positive controls, made from virus-like particles, are stable and easy to manufacture. Researchers say the controls have the potential to improve the accuracy of new COVID-19 tests that are simpler, faster and cheaper, making it possible to expand testing outside the lab.
Current research predicts that by 2025, 1,800 million people are expected to be living in countries or regions with insufficient water resources, and models show increased severity of droughts in years to come. Food insecurity and other consequences of droughts will become intensified, influencing disease vulnerabilities among populations in less-developed countries.
It is conventional to believe that the police role in society centers on violence. A forthcoming article in the December issue of Current Anthropology explores that belief and shows how the weakness of police power can be treated as an index for the strength of democratic values institutionalized in the wider political environment.