Culture
POSTECH Professor Seung-Ki Min’s joint research team identifies the mechanism behind the reduction in precipitation after volcanic eruptions
Volcano-induced El Niño amplifies the reduction in precipitation. Safety of geoengineering that mimic volcanoes is not guaranteed.
Public parks are many things to many people: a space devoid of domestic chores and patriarchal expectations, a spot to cultivate friendship or love, a place where you can experience a feeling of freedom that is absent elsewhere, an opportunity to «visit» trees from a country you have not seen in a long time, a way of being part of a group while sitting alone on your bench - or even the perfect setting for running a small business to help you get by.
When people are highly confident in a decision, they take in information that confirms their decision, but fail to process information which contradicts it, finds a UCL brain imaging study.
The study, published in Nature Communications, helps to explain the neural processes that contribute to the confirmation bias entrenched in most people's thought processes.
A recent study among 3- to 7-year-old children showed that children's motor skills benefitted if a child was older and participated in organised sports. Additionally, the study provided information about the importance of temperament traits for motor skills. More specifically, traits such as activity and attention span persistence were found to be positively associated with motor skills. This was a rather novel result, as the association between motor skills and temperament during early childhood is not yet widely understood.
What is the origin of the asteroids Bennu and Ryugu, and of their spinning-top shape? An international research team led by Patrick Michel, a CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire Lagrange (CNRS/Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur/Université Côte d'Azur) and Ronald-Louis Ballouz from the University of Arizona, proposes an answer to this question in an article published in Nature Communications on May 27, 2020.
University of Vaasa (Finland) researchers propose a model that is capable of explaining 87 percent of cryptocurrency bankruptcies after only one month of trading. It could potentially serve as a screening tool for investors keen to boost overall performance of cryptocurrency investment portfolios by avoiding investing in unreliable cryptocurrencies.
The drug nimodipine could prevent nerve cells from dying after brain surgery. Pharmacists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), in cooperation with neurosurgeons at University Hospital Halle (Saale) (UKH), have developed a new method that enables the drug to be administered directly in the brain with fewer side effects. Their findings were published in the “European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics”.
Fitness tracker bracelets and watches provide useful information, such as step count and heart rate, but they usually can't provide more detailed data about the wearer's health. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed smart electronic glasses (e-glasses) that not only monitor a person's brain waves and body movements, but also can function as sunglasses and allow users to control a video game with eye motions.
Resembling giant mealworms, superworms (Zophobas atratus) are beetle larvae that are often sold in pet stores as feed for reptiles, fish and birds. In addition to their relatively large size (about 2 inches long), these worms have another superpower: They can degrade polystyrene plastic. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have linked this ability to a strain of bacteria that lives in the larvae's gut.
PHILADELPHIA - Checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy, that target myeloid immune cells and slow tumor growth were discovered by a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions. Reporting in Nature Cancer, the researchers showed for the first time in human cells and a mouse model that inhibiting the c-Rel molecule in myeloid cells -- as opposed to lymphoid cells that today's immunotherapies target -- blocked the production of immune suppressor cells and significantly shrank tumors.
During sleep and under anesthesia, we rarely respond to such external stimuli as sounds even though our brains remain highly active.
Now, a series of new studies by researchers at Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience find, among other important discoveries, that noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter secreted in response to stress, lies at the heart of our ability to "shut off" our sensory responses and sleep soundly.
More like mom or dad? Human babies always get this curious look in their face combined with the question whom the child resembles most. The answers vary depending on the degree of kinship, gender and the time of assessment. Mandrills, monkeys living in Equatorial Africa, may recognize facial features coding relatedness better than humans.
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its rapid spread, the scientific community has been working on developing an effective treatment for the virus responsible for the disease. Finding drugs that can inhibit the infection caused by SARS-CoV-2 is an essential step to finding the vaccine that can definitively bring the spread of the virus to an end.
In many social species, including humans, even if large group sizes provide competitive advantages over smaller neighboring groups, the preponderant role of adult males in territoriality has often been put forward, most likely biased by an anthropocentric perspective.
A recent study of hip fracture rates in nursing homes in the U.S. reports a slight rise in the rate of hip fractures among long-stay residents in recent years. Researchers looked at data collected between 2007 and 2015 and found, despite a dip in 2013, rates have begun to rise again even though long- stay nursing home admissions have declined. Sarah T. Berry, M.D., M.P.H., Associate Director of the Musculoskeletal Research Center in the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research, is lead author on the paper recently published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.