Tech
As COVID-19 vaccines slowly roll out across the world, government officials in densely populated countries must still manage vulnerable communities at highest risk of an outbreak.
An estimated 6 million Americans may suffer from peanut allergies. Tiny amounts of peanut protein can lead to hives, itching, tingling in the mouth, shortness of breath or nausea within minutes.
A recent study published in JCI found that a neutrophil’s endoplasmic reticulum, the organelle that normally makes proteins in the cell, becomes stressed in the autoimmune disorder lupus. This stress activates a molecule called IRE1α, which appears to play a critical role in lupus pathogenesis in mice.
Bariatric surgery can significantly reduce the risk of cancer--and especially obesity-related cancers--by as much as half in certain individuals, according to a study by researchers at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School's Center for Liver Diseases and Liver Masses.
The alarm bells began ringing when dozens of eagles were found dead near an Arkansas lake.
Their deaths--and, later, the deaths of other waterfowl, amphibians and fish--were the result of a neurological disease that caused holes to form in the white matter of their brains. Field and laboratory research over nearly three decades has established the primary clues needed to solve this wildlife mystery: Eagle and waterfowl deaths occur in late fall and winter within reservoirs with excess invasive aquatic weeds, and birds can die within five days after arrival.
'A persistent and troubling rural disadvantage'
Strategies needed to support rural Americans
CHICAGO ---Heart failure deaths are persistently higher in rural areas of the United States compared with urban areas, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. The research also showed race disparities in heart failure are prevalent in rural and urban areas with greatest increases among Black adults under 65 years old.
Heart failure deaths have been increasing nationally since 2011, but there is significant geographic variation in these patterns based on race.
Using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen can be an effective way to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel, with further benefits if that electricity is generated from renewable energy sources. But as water-splitting technologies improve, often using porous electrode materials to provide greater surface areas for electrochemical reactions, their efficiency is often limited by the formation of bubbles that can block or clog the reactive surfaces.
In the year since the coronavirus pandemic upended how just about every person on the planet interacts with one another, video conferencing has become the de facto tool for group collaboration within many organizations. The prevalent assumption is that technology that helps to mimic face-to-face interactions via a video camera will be most effective in achieving the same results, yet there's little data to actually back up this presumption.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have uncovered an innovative way to tap into the over-capacity of 5G networks, turning them into "a wireless power grid" for powering Internet of Things (IoT) devices that today need batteries to operate.
Bright semiconductor nanocrystals known as quantum dots give QLED TV screens their vibrant colors. But attempts to increase the intensity of that light generate heat instead, reducing the dots' light-producing efficiency.
A new study explains why, and the results have broad implications for developing future quantum and photonics technologies where light replaces electrons in computers and fluids in refrigerators, for example.
From microwave ovens to Wi-Fi connections, the radio waves that permeate the environment are not just signals of energy consumed but are also sources of energy themselves. An international team of researchers, led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, has developed a way to harvest energy from radio waves to power wearable devices.
The researchers recently published their method inMaterials Today Physics.
Efforts to shift from petrochemical plastics to renewable and biodegradable plastics have proven tricky -- the production process can require toxic chemicals and is expensive, and the mechanical strength and water stability is often insufficient. But researchers have made a breakthrough, using wood byproducts, that shows promise for producing more durable and sustainable bioplastics.
University of Illinois Chicago researchers are the first to report on the financial conflicts of interest that exist among doctors who review the chest X-rays of coal miners who file workers' compensation claims of totally disabling disease with the U.S. Department of Labor's Federal Black Lung Program.
The UIC researchers found that the determinations of these doctors - who are known as B-readers and who are certified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH - were strongly associated with the party that hired them.
X-rays, first used clinically in the late 1890s, could be a leading-edge diagnostic tool for COVID-19 patients with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a team of researchers in Brazil who taught a computer program, through various machine learning methods, to detect COVID-19 in chest X-rays with 95.6 to 98.5% accuracy.
They published their results in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, a joint publication of the IEEE and the Chinese Association of Automation.