Culture
Happiness, as measured by a wearable biometric device, was closely related to productivity among a group of factory workers in Laos, reveals a recent study.
The team of researchers from the School of Economics at Hiroshima University conducted a study to examine relationships between toy painters' productivity and on-the-job emotional states.
While employee productivity has already been linked to job conditions, mental health, and other demographic factors, this study adds to a deeper understanding of how emotional states affect productivity.
A new study led by researchers at the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation explores these questions using real time data from 100 youth participants from 16-20 years old to assess the effect of exposure to tobacco outlets on same-day smoking and the number of cigarettes consumed.
Across two weeks, participants carried GPS-enabled smartphones that recorded their location at one-minute intervals and invited youth to respond to brief daily surveys.
Researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have together with an international team mapped the relationship between length of pregnancy and chemical DNA changes in more than 6,000 newborn babies. For each week's longer pregnancy, DNA methylation changes in thousands of genes were detected in the umbilical cord blood. The study is published in Genome Medicine.
The scope of childhood malnutrition has decreased since 2000, although millions of children under five years of age are still undernourished and, as a result, have stunted growth. An international team of researchers analysed the scope of global childhood malnutrition in 2000 and 2017, and estimated the probability of achieving the World Health Organization Global Nutrition Targets by 2025.
For billions of years life on Earth was restricted to aquatic environments, the oceans, seas, rivers and lakes. Then 450 million years ago the first plants colonized land, evolving in the process multiple types of beneficial relationships with microbes in the soil.
These relationships, known as symbioses, allow plants to access additional nutrients. The most intimate among them are intracellular symbioses that result in the accommodation of microbes inside plant cells.
Insects rely on a mix of floral resources for survival. Populations of bees, butterflies, and flies are currently rapidly decreasing due to the loss of flower-rich meadows. In order to deal with the widespread loss of fauna, the European Union supports "greening" measures, for example, the creation of flower strips.
The forest biodiversity experiment BEF-China began in 2009 with the collaboration among institutions in China, Germany and Switzerland and is one of the world's biggest field experiment. In the subtropical forests in southeastern China the international team planted over 500 plots of 670 square meters of land with 400 trees each - with each plot receiving between one and 16 tree species in various combinations. The researchers simulated both random and directed species extinction scenarios and analyzed the data.
Directed loss of species reduces productivity
Bioinformatics scientists from ITMO University have developed a programming tool that allows for quick and effective analysis of genome data and using it as a basis for building the most probable models of demographic history of populations of plants, animals and people.
Tiny, laser-activated magnets could enable cloud computing systems to process data up to 100 times faster than current technologies, a study suggests.
Chemists have studied a new magnetic material that could boost the storage capacity and processing speed of hard drives used in cloud-based servers.
This could enable people using cloud data systems to load large files in seconds instead of minutes, researchers say.
A team led by scientists from the University of Edinburgh created the material - known as a single-molecule magnet - in the lab.
A research collaboration led by the University of York's Department of Physics has created open-source software to assist in the creation of quantum materials which could in turn vastly increase the world's computing power.
Throughout the world the increased use of data centres and cloud computing are consuming growing amounts of energy - quantum materials could help tackle this problem, say the researchers.
Scientists from St Petersburg University worked with their colleagues from the St Petersburg branch of the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics. They conducted experiments on laboratory rats and showed that the FRX1 protein in the brains of young and healthy animals functions in an amyloid form. The previously published reports indicate that this protein controls long term memory and emotions: mice that have the FRX1 gene "off" quickly remember even complex mazes, and animals that have too much of this protein do not suffer from depression even after severe stress.
Biochemistry - Chasing the antidote
In the most comprehensive, structure-based approach to date, a team of scientists may have discovered a new family of antidotes for certain poisons that can mitigate their effects more efficiently compared with existing remedies.
Poisons such as organophosphorus nerve agents and pesticides wreak havoc by blocking an enzyme essential for proper brain and nerve function. Fast-acting drugs, called reactivators, are required to reach the central nervous system and counteract damage that could lead to death.
SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer - For all its shortcomings, the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country remains an important barometer of its economic health, strongly influencing both private and public spending. Though conceptually simple as the total dollar value of all goods and services produced within a specified time frame, calculating GDP is tricky in practice and can be manipulated by individual firms in a strategy known as earnings management.
Although boron nitride looks very similar to graphene in structure, it has completely different optoelectronic properties. Its constituents, the elements boron and nitrogen, arrange - like carbon atoms in graphene - a honeycomb-like hexagonal structure. They arrange themselves in two-dimensional layers that are only one atomic layer thick. The individual layers are only weakly coupled to each other by so-called van der Waals forces and can therefore be easily separated from each other.
Publication in Nature Materials
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Environmental concerns about hydraulic fracturing - aka "fracking," the process by which oil and gas are extracted from rock by injecting high-pressure mixtures of water and chemicals - are well documented, but according to a paper co-written by a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign environmental economics expert, the technique also poses a serious safety risk to local traffic.