Culture
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.
Resistance to a deadly disease that is affecting the second most farmed fish in the world has been found to be mainly due to differences in genes between families of the same fish.
The breakthrough could help protect stocks of Tilapia fish, which is an important food source in Africa, Asia and South America and worth nearly $10 billion to the global economy.
Since its detection in 2014, Tilapia Lake Virus (TiLV) has ravaged Tilapia populations in 16 countries across three continents.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Nowhere is this principle more true than in the world of social media. There, people choose cab drivers, Airbnb rentals and even life partners based on photos.
In online transactions like Airbnb, photos play an outsized role in a renter's decision-making process: Which host looks trustworthy? Who do I think will provide me a nice rental--one that closely resembles the photos they posted?
Using Salmonella enterica genomes recovered from human skeletons as old as 6,500 years, an international team of researchers illustrates the evolution of a human pathogen and provides the first ancient DNA evidence in support of the hypothesis that the cultural transition from foraging to farming facilitated the emergence of human-adapted pathogens that persist until today.
Young burglars are driven by a desire for excitement when they initially commit crime, new research from the University of Portsmouth has found.
The paper published today highlights the importance of positive emotion in the initial decisions to commit crime which drive the young person into habitual offending.
Mantis shrimp (Squilla mantis) don't take kindly to captivity. 'They have a general baseline of being angry', chuckles Kate Feller, currently at the University of Minnesota, USA, recalling how the contrary stomatopods are particularly keen to lash out when exposed to air. 'I had developed a means of holding mantis shrimp with their striking appendages out of water while their gills [arranged beneath the tail] remained submerged for an electrophysiology study I was conducting', recalls Feller.
Everyone approaches romantic relationships differently. On one end of the spectrum are people who crave closeness so much, they may come across as "clingy." On the other end are those who value their independence so deeply that they avoid getting too close to anyone else.
Those two extremes of romantic attachment orientation - known as attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance - can both have negative consequences for well-being due, at least in part, to financial reasons, a study led by the University of Arizona found.
Widely studied in many different fields, 'nonlinear' systems can display excessively dramatic responses when the forces which cause them to vibrate are changed. Some of these systems are sensitive to changes in the very parameters which define their driving forces, and can be well described using mathematical equations. These 'parametric' oscillators have been widely researched in the past, but so far, few studies have investigated how they will respond to multiple driving forces.
A natural experiment created by an active volcano gives new insight into the long-term negative impacts of human colonisation of tropical forest islands. The findings are published in the British Ecological Society journal, Journal of Ecology.
Researchers from the University of Réunion island surveyed vegetation on more than 600 years of lava flows on the slopes of Piton de La Fournaise, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Réunion island is part for the Mascarene archipelago which also includes Rodrigues and Mauritius, home of the extinct dodo.
A four-week randomised controlled trial of 348 children aged 8-12 years, published in journal The Lancet Digital Health, suggests that a digital intervention for paediatric attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might help to improve inattention with minimal adverse effects. Further research is needed to confirm the clinical meaningfulness of the observed changes, but the digital nature of the intervention could help to improve access for some patients.
A better understanding of the lived experience of people with schizophrenia would enable clinicians to help patients live with their condition, alongside treating symptoms with medication and psychotherapy, say experts at the University of Birmingham.
According to researchers at the University, this approach would involve developing an understanding of 'self-disturbance' in schizophrenia - in which patients' sense of connection to themselves and to their actions is disrupted.