Tech
BETHESDA, Md. -- The COVID-19 pandemic heavily influenced spending on prescription drugs in the U.S. in 2020, according to the ASHP's (American Society of Health-System Pharmacists) National Trends in Prescription Drug Expenditures and Projections for 2021. Shifts in care related to the pandemic will continue to be a significant driver of drug expenditures in 2021, along with uptake in the use of biosimilars, a large pipeline of new cancer drugs, and increased approvals of specialty medications.
Brandi Wren was studying social distancing and infections before masking tape marks appeared on the grocery store floor and plastic barriers went up in the post office.
Scientists have found fragments of titanium blasting out of a famous supernova. This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, could be a major step in pinpointing exactly how some giant stars explode.
This work is based on Chandra observations of the remains of a supernova called Cassiopeia A (Cas A), located in our galaxy about 11,000 light-years from Earth. This is one of the youngest known supernova remnants, with an age of about 350 years.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- With Army funding, scientists invented a way to make compostable plastics break down within a few weeks with just heat and water. This advance will potentially solve waste management challenges at forward operating bases and offer additional technological advances for American Soldiers.
The new process, developed by researchers at University of California, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, involves embedding polyester-eating enzymes in the plastic as it's made.
Making the speed of electronic technology as fast as possible is a central aim of contemporary materials research. The key components of fast computing technologies are transistors: switching devices that turn electrical currents on and off very quickly as basic steps of logic operations. In order to improve our knowledge about ideal transistor materials, physicists are constantly trying to determine new methods to accomplish such extremely fast switches.
When deciding whether to have children, there are many factors to consider: finances, support systems, personal values. For a growing number of people, climate change is also being added to the list of considerations, says a University of Arizona researcher.
Sabrina Helm, an associate professor in the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is lead author of a new peer-reviewed study that looks at how climate change is affecting people's decisions about whether to have children.
Like humans, certain plants are treated with antibiotics to ward off pathogens and protect the host. Saving millions, antibiotics are one of the 20th century's greatest scientific discoveries, but repeated use and misuse of these life-saving microbial products can disrupt the human microbiome and can have severe effects on an individual's health. Overuse has led to several microbes developing resistance to the antibiotic, rendering it useless, and created "superbugs" that overpower medication. But do we find that same phenomenon in plants and our food industry?
UC Riverside engineers are developing methods to estimate the impact of California's destructive wildfires on air quality in neighborhoods affected by the smoke from these fires. Their research, funded by NASA and the results published in Atmospheric Pollution Research, fills in the gaps in current methods by providing air quality information at the neighborhood scales required by public health officials to make health assessments and evacuation recommendations.
Skoltech scientists in collaboration with researchers from the University of Arizona and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed an approach that allows power grids to return to stability fast after demand response perturbation. Their research at the crossroads of demand response, smart grids, and power grid control was published in the journal Applied Energy.
From sample preparation to image acquisition, electron microscopy (EM) requires precise and time-consuming steps to produce the clarity and detail needed to visualize small cell structures with high resolution. Moreover, once EM images are created, extracting the biological information out of them through analysis can be an even more laborious and time intensive task. Especially because current EM analysis software often requires the skilled eye of a scientist to manually review hundreds of images.
A Texas A&M researcher is discovering the demographic characteristics that can produce or lessen stress for racial and ethnic minority students in school settings.
When hydraulic fracturing operations ground to a halt last spring in the Kiskatinaw area of British Columbia, researchers expected seismic quiescence in the region. Instead, hundreds of small earthquakes occurred for months after operations shut down, according to a new study.
In her presentation at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Rebecca Salvage of the University of Calgary said about 65% of these events could not be attributed to either natural seismicity or active fluid injection from hydraulic fracturing operations.
An expansive project led by Michigan State University's Lars Brudvig is examining the benefits, and limits, of environmental restoration on developed land after humans are done with it.
Experts estimate there are up to 17 million square miles of land worldwide that have been altered by humans -- through cultivation say -- and then abandoned. That's more than four times the size of the continental United States.
Engineered, autonomous machines combined with artificial intelligence have long been a staple of science fiction, and often in the role of villain like the Cylons in the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot, creatures composed of biological and engineered materials. But what if these autonomous soft machines were ... helpful?
Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have developed a stable high-conductivity polymer ink. The advance paves the way for innovative printed electronics with high energy efficiency. The results have been published in Nature Communications.
Electrically conducting polymers have made possible the development of flexible and lightweight electronic components such as organic biosensors, solar cells, light-emitting diodes, transistors, and batteries.