Culture
PITTSBURGH--Complete the following sentence: Rohingya refugees should go to¬¬¬ --
A. Pakistan.
B. Bangladesh.
C. Hell.
These aren't good choices, but all are sentiments that have been expressed repeatedly on social media. The Rohingyas, who began fleeing Myanamar in 2017 to avoid ethnic cleansing, are ill-equipped to defend themselves from these online attacks, but innovations from Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (LTI) could help counter the hate speech directed at them and other voiceless groups.
While waiting for free firearm storage devices at gun safety events held in sporting goods stores across Washington, nearly 3,000 people filled out a one-page survey asking how they stored guns at home and other household information.
Salvage logging and re-seeding a forest after a wildfire helps reduce flooding and returns water levels to normal faster, according to a new paper from a Washington State University researcher.
The paper, just published in the journal Hydrological Processes, shows that water levels are still increased up to 40 years after a fire.
Birds are the best known class of animals, and since 1999, only five or six new species have been described each year on average. Recently, a joint research team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) made a quantum leap in the discovery of cryptic avian diversity by uncovering five bird species and five subspecies new to science.
In November of last year, the wildfire that started in California, U.S.A burned areas that amount about the size of Seoul and destructed over 500 buildings for two weeks. In 2018, six fires started simultaneously in southern California and spread out to the neighboring areas, burning total of 405 km2 with 86 fatalities and 200,000 victims for three days. Also, large-scale wildfires often occur in the northern inland of Russia.
A single cell contains the genetic instructions for an entire organism. This genomic information is managed and processed by the complex machinery of chromatin -- a mix of DNA and protein within chromosomes whose function and role in disease are of increasing interest to scientists.
The expansion of Medicaid coverage for low-income adults permitted by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was associated with a six percent reduction in total opioid overdose deaths nationally, according to new research from NYU Grossman School of Medicine and University of California, Davis.
Congenital Zika Syndrome (CZS) refers to a collection of developmental malformations associated with Zika virus (ZIKV) congenital infection. This syndrome includes devastating conditions that have a huge impact on the rest of the life of the individual and their family, such as smaller (microcephaly) and unfolded (lissencephalic) brains, retinal abnormalities, enlarged ventricles of the heart, a lack of the inter-hemispheric connections and calcifications in the brain.
Computational biologists led by Prof. Yvan Saeys (VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research) developed a new bioinformatics method to better study communication between cells. This method, called NicheNet, helps researchers to gain insight into how the gene expression of cells is regulated by interacting cells. NicheNet has a broad range of potential applications in fields like immunology and tumor biology, and was already successfully used by the collaborating group of Prof. Martin Guilliams (VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research).
Cell neighbors
Stellar black holes form when massive stars end their life in a dramatic collapse. Observations have shown that stellar black holes typically have masses of about ten times that of the Sun, in accordance with the theory of stellar evolution. Recently, a Chinese team of astronomers claimed to have discovered a black hole as massive as 70 solar masses, which, if confirmed, would severely challenge the current view of stellar evolution. The publication immediately triggered theoretical investigations as well as additional observations by other astrophysicists.
A group of scientists, among them several from GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung and from Technical University of Darmstadt, succeeded to experimentally determine characteristics of nuclear processes in matter ten million times denser and 25 times hotter than the centre of our Sun. A result of the measurement is that intermediate-mass stars are very likely to explode, and not, as assumed until now, collapse. The findings are now published in the scientific magazine Physical Review Letters.
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and their colleagues in Germany, the USA and Finland have studied the safety of very long-term antipsychotic therapy for schizophrenia. According to the study, which is published in the scientific journal World Psychiatry, mortality was higher during periods when patients were not on medication than when they were.
The gene Cdkn1c could have been considered an open-and-shut case: Mice in which the gene is removed are larger and have bigger brains, so Cdkn1c should function to inhibit growth. This rationale has led to Cdkn1c being studied as a tumour suppressor gene. New research from the group of Simon Hippenmeyer, professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria), has now uncovered a novel, opposite role for Cdkn1c. When Cdkn1c is removed only in certain cells of the brain, these cells die, arguing for a new growth promoting role of Cdkn1c.
The use of environmental resources has been regulated for centuries with the aim of improving the management and behaviour of private and public actors on an on-going basis. But, does the never-ending introduction of new regulations really have a positive effect? Or, does a surfeit of rules cause malfunctions and lead to disturbing overlaps? In an attempt to answer these questions, researchers from the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Lausanne (UNIL), Switzerland, analysed water governance regulations in six European countries from 1750 to 2006.
A new study published by biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich demonstrates that there are no simple or universal solutions to the problem of engineering plants to enable them to cope with the challenges posed by climate change.