Tech
Viruses lurk in the grey area between the living and the nonliving, according to scientists. Like living things, they replicate but they don't do it on their own. The HIV-1 virus, like all viruses, needs to hijack a host cell through infection in order to make copies of itself.
The first imaging of substantial freshwater plumes west of Hawai'i Island may help water planners to optimize sustainable yields and aquifer storage calculations. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa researchers demonstrated a new method to detect freshwater plumes between the seafloor and ocean surface in a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.
A new invention that uses sunlight to drive water purification could help solve the problem of providing clean water off the grid.
The device resembles a large sponge that soaks up water but leaves contaminants - like lead, oil and pathogens - behind. To collect the purified water from the sponge, one simply places it in sunlight. The researchers described the device in a paper published this week in the journal Advanced Materials.
Scientists from the Skoltech Center for Energy Science and Technology (CEST) have developed a method for modeling the behavior of 2D materials under pressure. The research will help create pressure sensors based on silicene or other 2D materials. The paper was published in the ACS Nano journal.
High cholesterol is the most commonly understood cause of atherosclerosis, a hardening of the arteries that raises the risk of heart attack and stroke. But now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a gene that likely plays a causal role in coronary artery disease independent of cholesterol levels. The gene also likely has roles in related cardiovascular diseases, including high blood pressure and diabetes.
The study appears March 24 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Ishikawa, Japan - Any high-performance computing should be able to handle a vast amount of data in a short amount of time -- an important aspect on which entire fields (data science, Big Data) are based. Usually, the first step to managing a large amount of data is to either classify it based on well-defined attributes or--as is typical in machine learning--"cluster" them into groups such that data points in the same group are more similar to one another than to those in another group.
On sultry summer afternoons, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems provide much-needed relief from the harsh heat and humidity. These systems, which often come with dehumidifiers, are currently not energy efficient, guzzling around 76% of the electricity in commercial and residential buildings.
BOSTON - COVID-19 can have damaging effects on multiple organs in the body, including the brain. A new study led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) indicates that some hospitalized patients with COVID-19 experience non-convulsive seizures, which may put them at a higher risk of dying. The findings are published in the Annals of Neurology.
HOUSTON - (March 30, 2021) - Whether parents prefer a conformance-oriented or independence-oriented supplemental education program for their children depends on political ideology, according to a study of more than 8,500 American parents by a research team from Rice University and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Boulder, Colo., USA: Anthropogenic climate change is one of the foremost scientific and societal challenges. In part, our response to this global challenge requires an enhanced understanding of how the Earth's surface responds to episodes of climatic heating and cooling. As historical records extend back only a few hundred years, we must look back into the ancient rock record to see how the surface of the Earth has responded to shifts between icehouse (presence of ice at the Earth's poles) and greenhouse (no substantial ice at Earth's poles) climates in the past.
A year ago scientists everywhere were scrambling to get their minds around the SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus that caused the pandemic from which we are only now beginning to emerge. The world clung to every new development, every bit of science that could provide clues to managing life in the presence of this mysterious killer.
Gustavo Aguirre and William Beltran, veterinary ophthalmologists and vision scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, have studied a wide range of different retinal blinding disorders. But the one caused by mutations in the NPHP5 gene, leading to a form of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), is one of the most severe.
"Children with this disorder are not visual," says Aguirre. "They have a wandering, searching look on their faces and are usually diagnosed at a young age."
Cone snails aren't glamorous. They don't have svelte waistlines or jaw-dropping good looks. Yet, some of these worm-hunting gastropods are the femme fatales or lady killers of the undersea world, according to a new study conducted by an international team of researchers, including University of Utah Health scientists.
Forty million people living in the Kanto region of Japan, which includes Tokyo, may be able to blame a meandering ocean current for increasing hot and humid summers, according to an analysis conducted by an international team of researchers. The Kuroshio Current flows north, bringing warm water from the tropics to Japan's southern coast. Since 2017, however, it has meandered off its traditional path, turning south before continuing north again. Now, scientists have found that the "large meander" is responsible for the uptick in humidity and temperature.
The era of big data has inundated nearly all scientific fields with torrents of newly available data with the power to stimulate new research and enable inquiry at scales not previously possible. This is particularly true for ecology, where rapid growth in remote sensing, monitoring, and community science initiatives has contributed to a massive surge in the quantity and kinds of environmental data that are available to researchers.