Culture
Holidaying in a disaster zone might seem crazy, but "volunteer tourism" can actually help communities recover from natural disasters, a new study finds. And it can offer a unique and rewarding experience for volunteers, if done carefully.
"When disaster hits a tourist destination - whether fire, flood, cyclone or earthquake - tourists naturally stay away, leaving communities to deal with loss of income on top of costs of repair and recovery," says study co-author Dr David Beirman, from the University of Technology Sydney.
Highlights:
Reanalysis of patient samples from 3 U.S. labs shows most tests didn't adequately analyze more than a quarter of genes.
Chance of detecting a disorder varied widely depending on which genes the lab completely analyzed in a given sample.
DALLAS - Jan. 6, 2020 - Children who undergo expansive genetic sequencing may not be getting the thorough DNA analysis their parents were expecting, say experts at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
DALLAS, Jan. 6, 2019 -- The resources needed to treat fulminant myocarditis - severe, inflammation of the heart that develops rapidly - are outlined in a new Scientific Statement (Statement) from the American Heart Association on how best to reduce fatalities from this rare condition. The Statement is published today in the Association's premier cardiovascular journal Circulation.
Scientists have developed a new method for detecting oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres that may accelerate the search for life.
One possible indication of life, or biosignature, is the presence of oxygen in an exoplanet's atmosphere. Oxygen is generated by life on Earth when organisms such as plants, algae, and cyanobacteria use photosynthesis to convert sunlight into chemical energy.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Researchers have developed a way to prop up a struggling immune system to enable its fight against sepsis, a deadly condition resulting from the body's extreme reaction to infection.
The scientists used nanotechnology to transform donated healthy immune cells into a drug with enhanced power to kill bacteria.
In experiments treating mice with sepsis, the engineered immune cells eliminated bacteria in blood and major organs, dramatically improving survival rates.
A novel method of combining advanced optical imaging with an artificial intelligence algorithm produces accurate, real-time intraoperative diagnosis of brain tumors, a new study finds.
Published in Nature Medicine on January 6, the study examined the diagnostic accuracy of brain tumor image classification through machine learning, compared with the accuracy of pathologist interpretation of conventional histologic images. The results for both methods were comparable: the AI-based diagnosis was 94.6% accurate, compared with 93.9% for the pathologist-based interpretation.
The mysterious disappearance of Greenland's Norse colonies sometime in the 15th century may have been down to the overexploitation of walrus populations for their tusks, according to a study of medieval artefacts from across Europe.
Founded by Erik the Red around 985AD after his exile from Iceland (or so the Sagas tell us), Norse communities in Greenland thrived for centuries - even gaining a bishop - before vanishing in the 1400s, leaving only ruins.
Jan. 6, 2020--A small wildfire in San Diego County in 2017 resulted in a big uptick in children visiting the emergency room for breathing problems, according to new research published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
AMES, Iowa - Researchers have developed new nanoscale technology to image and measure more of the stresses and strains on materials under high pressures.
As the researchers reported in the journal Science, that matters because, "Pressure alters the physical, chemical and electronic properties of matter."
Researchers have demonstrated a new all-optical technique for creating robust second-order nonlinear effects in materials that don't normally support them. Using a laser pulse fired at an array of gold triangles on a titanium dioxide (TiO2) slab, the researchers created excited electrons that briefly doubled the frequency of a beam from a second laser as it bounced off the amorphous TiO2 slab.
BEER-SHEVA, Israel, January 6, 2020 -- Children with autism have more significant sleep difficulties caused by shallower brain waves than typically developing children, according to researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). The study was reported in Sleep, the premier journal in the field.
A team of researchers have found that dogs and wolves are equally good at cooperating with partners to obtain a reward. When tested in same-species pairs, dogs and wolves proved equally successful and efficient at solving a given problem. This finding suggests that basic cooperation abilities were present in a common ancestor of dogs and wolves, and have not been lost in the domestication process.
Antibodies are key players in our immune system. These antibodies recognize antigens displayed on foreign cell membranes and thereby recruit attacking forces, called complements. This mechanism is detrimental to our own immune system at times when our own cells exhibit some molecules that resemble infectious bacterial ones. Guillain-Barré syndrome is a postinfectious autoimmune disorder which is characterized by antibodies misdirected against GM1, self-molecule found in our neuronal cells.
An international team of astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to create the most detailed image yet of the gas surrounding two supermassive black holes in a merging galaxy.
An iterative machine learning approach has identified elusive 800 million-year-old amino acid patterns that are responsible for facilitating protein interactions.