Tech
Psoriasis, a chronic skin condition that causes itchy, red, scaly patches, afflicts more than 8 million Americans and 125 million people worldwide. Small molecule-based drugs like steroids can penetrate the skin to treat the condition, but they can cause skin irritation and thinning and their efficacy can decrease over time.
Researchers from HSE University and the University of California San Diego, Igor Utochkin and Timothy Brady, have found new evidence of hierarchical encoding of images in visual working memory. It turns out that the precision of remembering and recalling individual objects in a group is affected by ensemble representations--the mean and standard deviation of all objects in the group. The study has been published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
DALLAS - July 22, 2020 - One member of a larger family of oxygen sensing enzymes could offer a viable target for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), UTSW researchers report in a new study. The findings, published online this week in Cancer Discovery, might offer hope to this subset of patients who have few effective treatment options and often face a poor prognosis.
Scientists have created an optical cochlear implant based on LED lights that can safely and partially restore the sensation of hearing in deaf rats and gerbils. Their design's light-based approach allowed it to deliver more accurate and pinpointed signals to auditory nerves compared with current implants based on electricity, which often suffer from poor sound quality. The technology also offers some improvements over previous experimental optical implants, suggesting it could boost the clinical viability of cochlear implants to treat hearing impairment.
FRANKFURT. The hurricanes in the Caribbean became more frequent and their force varied noticeably around the same time that classical Mayan culture in Central America suffered its final demise: We can gain these and other insights by looking at the climate archive created under the leadership of geoscientists from Goethe University and now presented in an article in "Nature" journal's "Scientific Reports" on 16 July.
BEND, Ore. -- When most people find that their actions have resulted in an undesirable outcome, they tend to rethink their decisions and ask, "What should I have done differently to avoid this outcome?"
When narcissists face the same situation, however, their refrain is, "No one could have seen this coming!"
In refusing to acknowledge that they have made a mistake, narcissists fail to learn from those mistakes, a recent study from Oregon State University - Cascades found.
MAYWOOD, IL--Vestibular schwannomas, more commonly known as acoustic neuromas, are benign brain tumors that develop on the balance (vestibular) and hearing or auditory nerves leading from the inner ear to the brain. These tumors are rare in children, and as a result, there is little consensus on common symptoms, tumor size, treatment, outcomes and recurrence rates for acoustic neuroma in pediatric patients.
Good health and a happy outlook on life may seem like equally worthy yet independent goals. A growing body of research, however, bolsters the case that a happy outlook can have a very real impact on your physical well-being.
New research published in the journal Psychological Science shows that both online and in-person psychological interventions--tactics specifically designed to boost subjective well-being--have positive effects on self-reported physical health. The online and in-person interventions were equally effective.
Post-surgical bleeding is associated with more deaths than blood clots from surgery, according to a Vanderbilt University Medical Center study published in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.
Researchers used nearly 15 years of data on millions of patients from the American College of Surgeons' National Surgical Quality Improvement Program database, and some very advanced computer techniques, to do a direct comparison of bleeding versus clotting after surgery for patients in the U.S.
As the Covid-19 shutdowns and stay-at-home orders brought much of the world's travel and commerce to a standstill, people around the world started noticing clearer skies as a result of lower levels of air pollution. Now, researchers have been able to demonstrate that those clearer skies had a measurable impact on the output from solar photovoltaic panels, leading to a more than 8 percent increase in the power output from installations in Delhi.
HANOVER, N.H. - July 22, 2020 - A citizen science program that began over a decade ago has confirmed the use of dragonflies to measure mercury pollution, according to a study in Environmental Science & Technology.
The national research effort, which grew from a regional project to collect dragonfly larvae, found that the young form of the insect predator can be used as a "biosentinel" to indicate the amount of mercury that is present in fish, amphibians and birds.
Spectroscopy is the use of light to analyze physical objects and biological samples. Different kinds of light can provide different kinds of information. Vacuum ultraviolet light is useful as it can aid people in a broad range of research fields, but generation of that light has been difficult and expensive. Researchers created a new device to efficiently generate this special kind of light using an ultrathin film with nanoscale perforations.
Abstract
A joint research team from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), led by Dr. Kyung-guen Song from the KIST Water Cycle Research Center and Dr. Won-jun Choi from the KIST Center for Opto-Electronic Materials and Devices, announced that it had used solar heat, a source of renewable energy, to develop a highly efficient membrane distillation technology that can produce drinking water from seawater or wastewater.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - An invention may turn one of the most widely used materials for biomedical applications into wearable devices to help monitor heart health.
A team from Purdue University developed self-powered wearable triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-based contact layers for monitoring cardiovascular health. TENGs help conserve mechanical energy and turn it into power.
The Purdue team's work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.