Culture
[Oakland, CA] As the western United States enters the 2020 wildfire season with anticipated above normal significant fire potential, a new report from Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy (PSE) provides the most expansive synthesis to date on the public health dimensions of wildfire and California's approaches to wildfire prevention and the mitigation of wildfire-related impacts.
A team of scientists led by Kenichiro Itami, Professor and Director of the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM), has developed a new method for the synthesis of three-dimensional nanocarbons with the potential to advance materials science.
Many factors must be kept in mind when designing a hospital, a factory, a shopping center or any industrial plant, and many questions can arise before deciding on the floor plans. What is the best placement for each different space? What distribution is the most appropriate in order to improve efficiency in these large areas? University of Cordoba researchers Laura García and Lorenzo Salas are trying to provide an answer to these questions, and to do so, they have turned to the marine world to simulate the behavior of coral reefs.
At Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, researchers have successfully established relationships between games and law of motions in mind through analogy of physics and game refinement theory.
KAIST researchers have been able to dial up and down creatures' lifespans by altering the activity of proteins found in roundworm cells that tell them to convert sugar into energy when their cellular energy is running low. Humans also have these proteins, offering up the intriguing possibilities for developing longevity-promoting drugs. These new findings were published on July 1 in Science Advances.
The authors say that health-care systems should ensure adequate availability of PPE and develop additional strategies to protect health-care workers from COVID-19, particularly those from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic backgrounds
Frontline healthcare workers may have substantially higher risk of reporting a positive test for COVID-19 than people from the general population, according to an observational study of almost 100,000 healthcare workers in the UK and USA published today in The Lancet Public Health journal.
July 31, 2020 (Huntsville, Ala.) - Although the Human Genome Project sequenced a nearly-complete human genome almost 20 years ago, only about two percent of the genes in the human genome have been extensively studied and identified as protein-coding genes. Proteins form the basis of living tissues and play a central role in biological processes.
This study, just accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters, is the first evidence for large scale dynamical differences between active and non-active galaxies in the local universe. The astronomers participating are from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL); as well as the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucia (IAA).
Using data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, scientists have developed a new model that successfully predicted seven of the Sun's biggest flares from the last solar cycle, out of a set of nine. With more development, the model could be used to one day inform forecasts of these intense bursts of solar radiation.
A majority of the world population lives on low lying lands near the sea, some of which are predicted to submerge by the end of the 21st century due to rising sea levels.
The most relevant quantity for assessing the impacts of sea-level change on these communities is the relative sea-level rise - the elevation change between the Earth's surface height and sea surface height. For an observer standing on the coastland, relative sea-level rise is the net change in the sea level, which also includes the rise and fall of the land beneath observer's feet.
New Haven, Conn. -- When college students learn specific techniques for managing stress and anxiety, their wellbeing improves across a range of measures and leads to better mental health, a new Yale study finds.
The research team evaluated three classroom-based wellness training programs that incorporate breathing and emotional intelligence strategies, finding that two led to improvements in aspects of wellbeing. The most effective program led to improvements in six areas, including depression and social connectedness.
Mandatory country-wide BCG vaccination found to correlate with slower growth rates of COVID-19 cases
Scientists have found that countries with mandatory Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination until at least the year 2000 tended to exhibit slower infection and death rates during the first 30 days of the outbreak of COVID-19 in their country. By applying a statistical model based on their findings, the researchers further estimated that only 468 people would likely have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. as of March 29, 2020 - which is 19% of the actual figure of 2,467 deaths by that date - if the U.S. had instituted mandatory BCG vaccination several decades ago.
Metabarcoding allows scientists to extract DNA from the environment (known as environmental DNA or eDNA), for example, river water or, as in the case of the study by the team from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Essen, Germany) within the German Barcode of Life project (GBOL II): Vera Zizka, Dr Martina Weiss and Prof Florian Leese, from individuals in bulk samples. Thus, they are able to detect what species inhabit a particular habitat.
According to recent Gallup polls, socialism is now more popular than capitalism among Democrats and young people, and support for "some form of socialism" among all Americans is at 43% (compared to 25% in 1942). Policies that went unmentioned or were declared out-of-bounds in elections four years ago--a federal jobs guarantee, single-payer health care, free college, massive tax hikes on the rich, and the Green New Deal--are commonplace in Democrats' 2020 campaigns.
The recent rise of authoritarian nationalist movements has reinforced the tendency of many on the left, and some on the right, to reject all forms of nationalism, writes Rogers M. Smith in "Toward Progressive Narratives of American Identity," published in Polity's May Symposium on the Challenges Facing Democrats.