Culture
As COVID-19 spread across the country earlier this year, forcing schools and universities to close, Jessica L. Malisch began to notice an alarming trend - but not related to the virus.
"I was alarmed by patterns I was observing in the academic community in regards to how COVID-19 campus and childcare closures appeared to be impacting female scientists disproportionately," said Malisch, an assistant professor of biology at St. Mary's College of Maryland.
BROOKLYN, New York, Tuesday, July 6, 2020 - Over the past 30 years, the use of glass- and carbon- fiber reinforced composites in aerospace and other high-performance applications has soared along with the broad industrial adoption of composite materials.
A study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry describes a new way to determine the age of insulin-storage parcels, known as granules, and sheds light on how their age affects their release into the bloodstream. The findings could help experts better understand diabetes and fine-tune therapies for it.
Whether it's on top of a self-driving car or embedded inside the latest gadget, Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) systems will likely play an important role in our technological future, enabling vehicles to 'see' in real-time, phones to map three-dimensional images and enhancing augmented reality in video games.
The challenge: these 3-D imaging systems can be bulky, expensive and hard to shrink down to the size needed for these up-and-coming applications. But University of Colorado Boulder researchers are one big step closer to a solution.
BOSTON - Many patients with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) remain unresponsive after surviving critical illness. Investigators led by a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) now describe a patient with severe COVID-19 who, despite prolonged unresponsiveness and structural brain abnormalities, demonstrated functionally intact brain connections and weeks later he recovered the ability to follow commands. The case, which is published in the Annals of Neurology, suggests that unresponsive patients with COVID-19 may have a better chance of recovery than expected.
LAWRENCE -- It lacks the drama of a shape-shifting alien creature, but another threat looms over the prospect of generations-long, interstellar space travel: Explorers arriving on Xanadu could face problems communicating with previous and subsequent arrivals, their spoken language having changed in isolation along the way.
Biologists from Lomonosov Moscow State University and HSE University have studied the patterns of flower development in yellow water-lily (Nuphar lutea). They found out that all the floral organs are arranged in cycles (whorls) rather than inserted sequentially in a spiral, as is the case in some other basal angiosperms. The ancestors of yellow pond-lily were among the first to diverge from the root of the angiosperm evolutionary tree, which is why it can be used to hypothesize about the structure of the first flowers.
There's a fairly large flaw in the way that programmers are currently addressing ethical concerns related to artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles (AVs). Namely, existing approaches don't account for the fact that people might try to use the AVs to do something bad.
For example, let's say that there is an autonomous vehicle with no passengers and it is about to crash into a car containing five people. It can avoid the collision by swerving out of the road, but it would then hit a pedestrian.
Global success for Canadian companies depends on prior R&D investment, receptiveness to new learning
Global success for Canadian companies depends on prior R&D investment, receptiveness to new learning, shows new study.
Toronto - Canadian companies that go international are known to be more productive and successful than those that don't.
To make new memories, our brain cells first must find one another. Small protrusions that bud out from the ends of neurons' long, branching tentacles dock neurons together so they can talk. These ports of cellular chatter -- called synapses, and found in the trillions throughout the brain -- allow us to represent new knowledge. But scientists are still learning just how these connections form in response to new experiences and information.
We all can describe our ideal partner. Perhaps they are funny, attractive and inquisitive. Or maybe they are down-to-earth, intelligent and thoughtful. But do we actually have special insight into ourselves, or are we just describing positive qualities that everyone likes?
An efficient, robust method of examining the interactions between cells uses fluorescent tagging to simultaneously analyze multiple cell populations, speeding up a once tedious and limiting process. The new assay developed by KAUST also has applications in studying cellular processes in inflammation or cancer cell metastasis and in assessing potential treatments.
COLUMBIA, SC -- Research from University of South Carolina associate professor Saurabh Chatterjee's laboratory in Environmental Health Sciences, Arnold School of Public Health, and led by Ayan Mondal, a postdoctoral researcher from the same lab, has revealed the cause behind the previously established link between non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (i.e., NAFLD, recently reclassified as metabolic associated fatty liver disease or MAFLD) and neurological problems.
Teenagers who prefer to stay up late at night and sleep in late the next day are more likely to develop asthma and allergies than their "early bird" counterparts, according to new research published today.
Below please find a summary and link(s) of new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. The summary below is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. A collection of coronavirus-related content is free to the public at http://go.annals.org/coronavirus.
1. Clinical Validity of COVID-19 Serum Antibodies