Culture
Costs to informal carers for people in the last three months of life are larger than those to formal
Findings from an international study into the costs and outcomes of informal end of life care have today been published BMC Medicine.
The study found that in the UK, Ireland and the US, care provided by informal carers, meaning family and friends, accounted for more than half of total care costs in the last three months of life.
Researchers concluded that there was an urgent need in all three countries to improve the integration and support for dedicated community palliative care services to improve the care quality and support people across the whole journey of care.
Much of what we know regarding how life--as we know it--came into existence is through the recovery of fossils from various sites in the word. The Chengjiang lagerstatte in Yunnan Province, China, is one such unique site containing very well-preserved fossils (also called the "Chengjiang fauna"), which include soft-bodied animals that normally do not get fossilized.
A group of Skoltech scientists developed machine learning (ML) algorithms that can teach artificial intelligence (AI) to determine oil viscosity based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data. The new method can come in handy for the petroleum industry and other sectors, which have to rely on indirect measurements to characterize a substance. The research was published in the Energy and Fuels journal.
The climate seems to be getting warmer. This could be bad news for species that depend on stable and abundant access to food at certain times of the year.
"If the changes happen too fast, species can become extinct," says Emily Simmonds, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Biology.
She is the first author of an article in Ecology Letters that addresses how great tits can be affected if the supply of larvae changes in the spring.
New research from Tel Aviv University will allow cameras to recognize colors that the human eye and even ordinary cameras are unable to perceive.
The technology makes it possible to image gases and substances such as hydrogen, carbon and sodium, each of which has a unique color in the infrared spectrum, as well as biological compounds that are found in nature but are "invisible" to the naked eye or ordinary cameras. It has groundbreaking applications in a variety of fields from computer gaming and photography as well as the disciplines of security, medicine and astronomy.
Climate - Ice breaker data
With the conclusion of an unprecedented yearlong expedition to the North Pole called MOSAiC, data from instruments installed on an Arctic ice floe are available to the scientific community to improve models that predict the environmental future of the planet.
CAMBRIDGE, MA - November 4, 2020--Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19), an open-access overlay journal published by the MIT Press that accelerates peer review of COVID-19-related research preprints, is currently soliciting reviews of the following COVID-19 preprints. These preprints have been selected for review because they have the potential to enhance our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 or have been flagged as potentially misleading. Preprints with two finished reviews should be published within 10-14 days.
Agência FAPESP – Yellow fever virus is normally confined to the Amazon region, but the virus circulated in the Southeast of Brazil between 2016 and 2018, causing the worst epidemic and epizootic outbreaks there for decades. The Ministry of Health confirmed 2,251 cases of yellow fever in humans and 1,567 cases in monkeys in Brazil between December 2016 and June 2019.
The volume and timbre of music have a significant impact on how people perceive the acoustics in a concert hall, according to two recent studies carried out by the research group of Aalto University Professor Tapio Lokki. Both have been published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, one of the most prestigious journals in its field.
People who experience strokes while infected with COVID-19 appear to be left with greater disability after the stroke, according a study led by UCL and UCLH researchers.
Having COVID-19 at stroke onset was also associated with more than double the mortality rate of other stroke patients, according to the findings published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.
Even if a black hole can be described with a mathematical model, it doesn't mean it exists in reality. Some theoretical models are unstable: though they can be used to run mathematical calculations, from the point of view of physics they make no sense. A physicist from RUDN University developed an approach to finding such instability regions. The work was published in the Physics of the Dark Universe journal.
Zoologists at the University of Cologne studied the nervous systems of insects to investigate principles of biological brain computation and possible implications for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Specifically, they analysed how insects learn to associate sensory information in their environment with a food reward, and how they can recall this information later in order to solve complex tasks such as the search for food.
One of the novel coronavirus' most insidious tricks is that it can block the ability of cells to produce protective proteins without hindering its own ability to replicate.
Now, a multidisciplinary team of Yale researchers has discovered how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, accomplishes this trick by blocking production of cellular proteins, including immune molecules, and contributes to severe illness in its host.
New research by BAT has found that smokers who switched completely from smoking cigarettes to using BAT's flagship tobacco heating product (THP), glo, substantially reduced their exposure to certain cigarette smoke toxicants over three months.
For many of the toxicants measured, the levels found in participants were similar to those in people that stopped using tobacco completely.
EUGENE, Ore. -- Nov. 5, 2020 -- Conservation efforts on the edges of the Amazon forest, especially in light of recent deforestation by human disturbance, could help the region weather the storm of climate change, researchers say.
That assessment comes from an analysis of vegetation changes and carbon isotope signatures in the soil at 83 sites. The project, led by University of Oregon doctoral student Jamie Wright, established a record of soil changes associated with both climate and human activity over the last 1,600 years based on radiocarbon dating.