Earth
In a large survey in sub-Saharan Africa, adults who said they had paid a bribe for healthcare in the past year were more than four times as likely to report difficulty in obtaining care than those who had not paid bribes. Amber Hsiao and colleagues at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, report these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 21, 2019.
Migration patterns in present-day Denmark shifted at the beginning of the Nordic Bronze Age, according to a study published August 21, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Karin Frei of the National Museum of Denmark and colleagues. Migrants appear to have come from varied and potentially distant locations during a period of unprecedented economic growth in southern Scandinavia in the 2nd millennium BC.
Almost one-third of people migrating to the US via Mexico experience physical, psychological, and/or sexual violence along the way, according to a study published August 21, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by René Leyva-Flores and Cesar Infante from the National Institute of Public Health (Mexico), Juan Pablo Gutierrez from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and colleagues.
Scientists may have uncovered how sea-surface temperature patterns influence the number, strength and distributions of April tornado formation in the south-central region of the United States known as "Tornado Alley." Their results underscore how shifting climate patterns potentially affect tornado formation within seasons, which could help reduce fatalities and widespread property loss during peak tornado months - by facilitating improved predictions.
The majority of soft robots today rely on external power and control, keeping them tethered to off-board systems or rigged with hard components. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Caltech have developed soft robotic systems, inspired by origami, that can move and change shape in response to external stimuli, paving the way for fully untethered soft robots.
The research is published in Science Robotics.
Increasingly frequent and severe forest fires could burn generations-old carbon stored in the soils of boreal forests, according to results from the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) funded by NASA's Earth Science Division. Releasing this previously buried carbon into the atmosphere could change these forests' balance of carbon gain and loss, potentially accelerating warming.
WASHINGTON (Aug. 21, 2019)--Online hate thrives globally through self-organized, scalable clusters that interconnect to form resilient networks spread across multiple social media platforms, countries and languages, according to new research published today in the journal Nature. Researchers at the George Washington University developed a mapping model, the first of its kind, to track how these online hate clusters thrive.
Frequent, Extreme Wildfires Threaten to Turn Boreal Forests from Carbon Sinks to Carbon Sources, Study Reveals
Carbon reservoirs in the soil of boreal forests are being released by more frequent and larger wildfires, according to a new study involving a University of Guelph researcher.
As wildfires continue to ravage northern areas across the globe, a research team investigated the impact of these extreme fires on previously intact carbon stores by studying the soil and vegetation of the boreal forest and how they changed after a record-setting fire season.
Apart from the states of matter that we are all aware of and accustomed to, which correspond to solids, liquids, and gases, more exotic states can be generated in specific materials under special conditions. Such states are of great interest to physicists because they help them gain a deeper understanding of quantum phenomena, which is key for scientists and engineers to innovate state-of-the-art technology.
Scientists have identified a specific gene they believe could be a key player in the changes in brain structure seen in several psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia and autism.
The team from Cardiff University's Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute has found that the deletion of the gene CYFIP1 leads to thinning of the insulation that covers nerve cells and is vital for the smooth and rapid communications between different parts of the brain.
Mental disorders experienced in adolescence and early adulthood that require hospital care are connected with low income, poor education and unemployment over the life span of individuals.
A recently completed Finnish study indicates that those who have been hospitalised due to a mental disorder before turning 25 have considerably poorer prospects on the labour market compared to the rest of the population. The risk of being absent from the labour market and not completing an upper secondary-level qualification or a higher degree is great.
New research has found that in 15 major cities in the global south, almost half of all households lack access to piped utility water, affecting more than 50 million people. Access is lowest in the cities of sub-Saharan Africa, where only 22% of households receive piped water.
The research also found that of those households that did have access, the majority received intermittent service. In the city of Karachi in Pakistan, the city's population of 15 million people received an average piped water supply of only three days a week, for less than three hours.
A good rainstorm can make a city feel clean and revitalized. However, the substances that wash off of buildings, streets and sidewalks and down storm drains might not be so refreshing. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have analyzed untreated urban stormwater from 50 rainstorms across the U.S., finding a wide variety of contaminants that could potentially harm aquatic organisms in surface waters and infiltrate ground water.
Irvine, Calif. -- Scientists from the University of California, Irvine School of Biological Sciences have discovered how to forestall Alzheimer's disease in a laboratory setting, a finding that could one day help in devising targeted drugs that prevent it.
The researchers found that by removing brain immune cells known as microglia from rodent models of Alzheimer's disease, beta-amyloid plaques - the hallmark pathology of AD - never formed. Their study will appear Aug. 21 in the journal Nature Communications.
Poo transplants are helping expand koala microbiomes, allowing the marsupials to eat a wider range of eucalypts and possibly survive habitat loss.
A study featuring University of Queensland researchers has analysed and altered microbes in koalas' guts, finding that a faecal transplant may influence what species of eucalypt koalas can feed on.
UQ School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences Dr Michaela Blyton was inspired to conduct the research after a devastating drop in the koala population on Cape Otway in Victoria.