Culture
Nurses and other healthcare providers should talk to patients about their cannabis use the same way they talk about other habits like smoking and drinking: routinely and without judgment.
Tsukuba, Japan - Social rewards such as praise are known to enhance various stages of the learning process. Now, researchers from Japan have found that praise delivered by artificial beings such as robots and virtual graphics-based agents can have effects similar to praise delivered by humans, with important practical applications as social services such as education increasingly move to virtual and online platforms.
A simple COVID-19 test kit combines virus amplification with a CRISPR-Cas system for effective SARS-CoV-2 detection. The kit, called iSCAN, uses reagents that can be locally manufactured.
"Our whole iSCAN procedure can be completed in less than an hour and can be easily adopted as a point-of-care detection system at airports and borders," says KAUST Ph.D. student Ahmed Mahas.
University of Adelaide wine researchers are developing a fast and simple method of authenticating wine - a potential solution against the estimated billions of dollars' worth of wine fraud globally, but also offering a possible means of building regional branding.
The team of scientists were able to identify the geographical origins of wines originating from three wine regions of Australia and from Bordeaux in France with 100% accuracy with a novel technique of molecular fingerprinting using 'fluorescence spectroscopy', a technology that analyses fluorescence of molecules.
Tokyo - Why did Japan largely contain COVID-19 despite famously jam-packed Tokyo and despite the country's proximity to China? With no penalties and only requests for cooperation, Japan's state of emergency somehow averted the large-scale outbreaks seen elsewhere. At least one viable answer has now emerged.
A new comparative analysis of people's mobility during the virus' first wave illustrates how drastically the Tokyo masses slowed. That slowdown may have throttled the spread of infections.
HANOVER, N.H. - November 5, 2020 - The biological clock of a popular food crop controls close to three-quarters of its genes, according to research from Dartmouth College.
The genetic research shows how the crop uses internal responses to the day-night cycle—known as circadian rhythms—to regulate processes such as reproduction, photosynthesis and reactions to stressful conditions.
Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have identified new therapeutic targets for Alzheimer's disease (AD) by studying the patients' brain with a newly-developed methodology. This novel approach also enables researchers to measure the effects of potential drugs on AD patients, opening new directions for AD research and drug development.
A new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows that individualised and family-based physical activity and dietary counselling considerably slows down the development of insulin resistance, which is a precursor of type 2 diabetes, in 6-9-year-old children. Published in Diabetologia, the study focused on predominantly normal-weight children.
For the first time, researchers have compared air pollution in urban and suburban areas across all of China. Using data from the China National Environmental Monitoring Center (CNEMC), the researchers found that one air pollutant, called particulate matter (PM2.5), may be overestimated in winter, while another pollutant, called ozone (O3), is significantly underestimated.
Plants can be infected by multiple viruses at once. However, the composition of the pathogen community varies, even if individuals belong to the same species and the same population. Ecologists at the University of Zurich have now shown that these differences are primarily due to genetic variation among the hosts. The loss of genetic diversity could thus render species more vulnerable to infections and extinction.
Musculoskeletal disorders--which affect muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, and joints--can severely affect individuals' physical and mental health, and they're especially prevalent among aging adults. Although many researchers are studying these conditions and their rates in different regions of the world, no study to date has provided an overview of the burden of all musculoskeletal disorders.
Researchers from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Tilburg University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that explores the rise of click-and-collect services and examines their most appropriate settings.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Navigating the Last Mile in Grocery Shopping: The Click and Collect Format" and is authored by Katrijn Gielens, Els Gijsbrechts, and Inge Geyskens.
The first fossils of a duckbilled dinosaur have been discovered in Africa, suggesting dinosaurs crossed hundreds of kilometres of open water to get there.
The study, published in Cretaceous Research, reports the new dinosaur, Ajnabia odysseus, from rocks in Morocco dating to the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Ajnabia was a member of the duckbill dinosaurs, diverse plant-eating dinosaurs that grew up to 15 meters long. But the new dinosaur was tiny compared to its kin - at just 3 meters long, it was as big as a pony.
DURHAM, N.C. -- A Duke Health-led research team has identified a key marker that will help speed effective vaccine designs for cytomegalovirus (CMV), the most common congenital infection worldwide and a leading cause of infant brain damage.
In a study appearing online Nov. 4 in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers describe an immune surrogate that demonstrates when a vaccine has elicited the necessary antibodies that protect against CMV infection. The finding is already being applied to screen potential vaccines.
For centuries, historians and scientists mostly agreed that when early human groups sought food, men hunted and women gathered. However, a 9,000-year-old female hunter burial in the Andes Mountains of South America reveals a different story, according to new research conducted at the University of California, Davis.