Culture
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Centuries of archaeological research on the Inca Empire has netted a veritable library of knowledge. But new digital and data-driven projects led by Brown University scholars are proving that there is much more to discover about pre-colonial life in the Andes.
Memphis, Tenn. (February 25, 2020) - Shelley White-Means, PhD, a professor of health economics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, is the principal investigator of a paper published this month in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health that found breast cancer support groups play a major role in helping underserved African-American women at risk for or diagnosed with breast cancer in Memphis.
Species adapt to their local climates, but how often they adapt to their local communities remains a mystery. To find answers, researchers at McGill University and the University of British Columbia examined over 125 studies testing local adaptation in over 100 species of plants and animals in an article published in The American Naturalist.
Scientists from Salk Institute (USA), Skoltech (Russia), and Riken Center for Brain Science (Japan) investigated a theoretical model of how populations of neurons in the visual cortex of the brain may recognize and process faces and their different expressions and how they are organized. The research was recently published in Neural Computation and highlighted on its cover.
New Rochelle, NY, February 25, 2020--A new study has shown that experiencing personalized experiences in a virtual reality setting can improve affect among university students. The study, which also showed that the use of personalized 360 video experiences is feasible for use in hospitalized patients to improve affect, is published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.
Among the most exciting challenges in modern physics is the identification of the neutrino mass ordering. Physicists from the Cluster of Excellence PRISMA+ at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) play a leading role in a new study that indicates that the puzzle of neutrino mass ordering may finally be solved in the next few years. This will be thanks to the combined performance of two new neutrino experiments that are in the pipeline - the Upgrade of the IceCube experiment at the South Pole and the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) in China.
An international team of scientists from ITMO University and George Washington University (USA) created an algorithm for studying the evolutionary history of species with whole-genome duplications, chiefly yeast and plants.
The program can be used to analyze the genetic information about these species and make conclusions on how whole-genome duplication took place and why it secured a foothold in the process of evolution. The article was published in Oxford Bioinformatics, one of the leading titles in the field of Computer Science.
A study of beverage sales in Cook County, Illinois, shows that for four months in 2017 -- when the county implemented a penny-per-ounce tax on both sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened drinks -- purchases of the taxed beverages decreased by 21%, even after an adjustment for cross-border shopping.
Hot air rises, cold air sinks. It’s a basic tenet of nature.
Because it sinks, cold air often finds depressions or low-lying terrain, like a valley or basin, in which to collect, particularly at night as temperatures decrease. As the sun rises and temperatures rise, the cold air warms and mixes with the surrounding air. But during winter, and even into spring, this cold air can linger — often for several days — in a phenomenon known as a “cold pool event.”
About 1 million people in the United States have ulcerative colitis, a serious disease of the colon that has no cure and whose cause is obscure. Now, a study by Stanford University School of Medicine investigators has tied the condition to a missing microbe.
The microbe makes metabolites that help keep the gut healthy.
WASHINGTON, February 25, 2020 -- A new type of battery combines negative capacitance and negative resistance within the same cell, allowing the cell to self-charge without losing energy, which has important implications for long-term storage and improved output power for batteries.
These batteries can be used in extremely low-frequency communications and in devices such as blinking lights, electronic beepers, voltage-controlled oscillators, inverters, switching power supplies, digital converters and function generators, and eventually for technologies related to modern computers.
The Toba super-eruption was one of the largest volcanic events over the last two million years, about 5,000 times larger than Mount St. Helen's eruption in the 1980s. The eruption occurred 74,000 years ago on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, and was argued to have ushered in a "volcanic winter" lasting six to ten years, leading to a 1,000 year-long cooling of the Earth's surface. Theories purported that the volcanic eruption would have led to major catastrophes, including the decimation of hominin populations and mammal populations in Asia, and the near extinction of our own species.
A research group, consisting of doctoral student FUJIWARA Ryosuke, Associate Professor TANAKA Tsutomu (both of Kobe University's Graduate School of Engineering) and Research Scientist NODA Shuhei (RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science), has succeeded in improving the yield of target chemical production from biomass. They achieved this through metabolically engineering the bacteria used in bioproduction, so that it would use different kinds of sugar absorbed from the biomass for separate aims.
Psychiatrists led by Nikolaos Koutsouleris from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have used a computer-based approach to assign psychotic patients diagnosed as bipolar or schizophrenic to five different subgroups. The method could lead to better therapies for psychoses.
The discovery of a calcium channel that is likely a 'missing link' in the evolution of mammalian calcium channels has been reported today in the open-access journal eLife.
Calcium channels that open and close in response to electrical signals in the brain are essential for thought, memory and muscle contractions. Studying the structure and evolution of these calcium channels in various organisms has revealed a lot about how they work.