Earth
What The Study Did: This observational study used national survey data from young people up to age 19 to estimate the overall diet quality of children and teens in the United States and to explore how diet quality has changed from 1999 to 2016.
Authors: Junxiu Liu, Ph.D., of Tufts University in Boston, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jama.2020.0878)
WASHINGTON, March 24, 2020 -- During the 1990s, Carver Mead and colleagues combined basic research in neuroscience with elegant analog circuit design in electronic engineering. This pioneering work on neuromorphic electronic circuits inspired researchers in Germany and Switzerland to explore the possibility of reproducing the physics of real neural circuits by using the physics of silicon.
A container ship leaves a trail of white clouds in its wake that can linger in the air for hours. This puffy line is not just exhaust from the engine, but a change in the clouds that's caused by small airborne particles of pollution.
With over 300,000 COVID-19 cases across the globe, including recent cases in Syria and the Gaza Strip, the data continues to demonstrate how the disease has no borders.
Although most cancer cells are killed by chemotherapy, individual cells vary in their sensitivity, so that some cancer cells often escape. Diversity among cancer cells is thus an issue for cancer treatment.
Previously diversity was thought to be mostly due to genetic variability among cancer cells. Now, however, University of Sydney researchers have discovered a whole new source of cancer cell diversity, with profound implications for cancer treatment.
Someone dies somewhere in the world every 10 seconds owing to physical inactivity - 3.2 million people a year according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). From the age of 50, there is a gradual decline not just in physical activity but also in cognitive abilities since the two are correlated. But which of them influences the other? Does physical activity impact on the brain or is it the other way around?
Researchers at the Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research (CAPP), within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS, South Korea), have reported the first results of their search of axions; elusive ultra-lightweight particles that could constitute the mysterious dark matter. IBS-CAPP is located at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Published in Physical Review Letters, the analysis combines data taken over three months with a new axion-hunting apparatus developed for the last two years.
Shungite, a unique carbon-rich sedimentary rock from Russia that deposited 2 billion years ago, holds clues about oxygen concentrations on Earth's surface at that time. Led by Professor Kurt Konhauser at the University of Alberta and Professor Kalle Kirsimäe at the University of Tartu, an international research team involving other colleagues from France, Norway, Russia, and USA, have found strikingly high molybdenum, uranium, and rhenium concentrations, as well as elevated uranium isotope ratios in drill cores that dissect the shungite rocks.
Whether it is a drug-resistant strain of bacteria, or cancer cells that no longer react to the drugs intended to kill them, diverse mutations make cells resistant to chemicals, and "second generation" approaches are needed. Now, a team of Penn State engineers may have a way to predict which mutations will occur in people, creating an easier path to create effective pharmaceuticals.
Noble metal aerogels (NMAs) are an emerging class of porous materials embracing nano-sized highly-active noble metals and porous structures, displaying unprecedented performance in diverse electrocatalytic processes. However, various impurities, particularly organic ligands, are often involved in the synthesis and remain in the corresponding products, hindering the investigation of the intrinsic electrocatalytic properties of NMAs. On the other hand, the presence of organic ligands is generally regarded detrimental to the catalytic process because they can block the active sites.
The ability to accurately monitor drug levels and biological molecules inside patients in real time has remained largely elusive.
Most of the implantable monitors invented so far rely on high tech and expensive detectors such as CT scans or MRI. Using ultrasound - which is cheap and portable - as a means to track a disease state as in response of a tumour to a new drug or the risk of a heart attack with the rise of a diagnostic protein called troponin has always been more a Blue Sky than reality.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Graphene-based biosensors could usher in an era of liquid biopsy, detecting DNA cancer markers circulating in a patient's blood or serum. But current designs need a lot of DNA. In a new study, crumpling graphene makes it more than ten thousand times more sensitive to DNA by creating electrical "hot spots," researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found.
The giant wombat may no longer roam the wilds of Australia, but wild donkeys certainly do, and new research reveals that the two are ecologically similar. Human hunting caused the extinction of many megafauna (large herbivorous mammals) over the last 100,000 years, but recently humans have introduced numerous herbivore species, rewilding many parts of the world, particularly Australia.
In most places, these introduced megafauna are viewed as invasive species.
The numbers that drive headlines - those on Covid-19 infections, for example - contain significant levels of uncertainty: assumptions, limitations, extrapolations, and so on.
Experts and journalists have long assumed that revealing the "noise" inherent in data confuses audiences and undermines trust, say University of Cambridge researchers, despite this being little studied.
AMHERST, Mass. - When cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar was shot dead in 1993, the four hippos he brought to his private zoo in Colombia were left behind in a pond on his ranch. Since then, their numbers have grown to an estimated 80-100, and the giant herbivores have made their way into the country's rivers. Scientists and the public alike have viewed Escobar's hippos as invasive pests that by no rights should run wild on the South American continent.